I placed my coat over the back of one of the chairs at the dining table and turned into the short hallway that led to her bedroom. Antique British travel posters of Brighton, the Cotswolds, and Cambridge lined both sides of the wall leading into another sterile-looking chamber with its queen-sized bed.
If the photographs with which she surrounded herself were any evidence of her priorities, Gemma Dogen certainly liked her role in the academic community. She beamed from platforms and podia when she was dressed in her professorial garb. Flags flanking the stage settings showed her equally at home in England and in America and I silently applauded a woman of her accomplishment who had been such a brilliant success in a specialty dominated for so long by men.
The alarm clock next to her bed was still displaying the correct time. I pressed the little button on top to see at what hour Gemma scheduled her days to begin. It flashed a reading of 5:30A.M. and I admired even more the discipline that drove her out that early, especially these March mornings, to run along the riverside path before going to work. The harsh buzz of the front doorbell brought me out of my reverie and I headed back to let Mercer in.
“Who else you expecting?” he asked, ridiculing the fact that I had looked through the peephole before turning the knob.
“You know my mother’s rules, Mercer.” I supposed I’d been doing that peephole thing instinctively since I moved to Manhattan more than a decade earlier. “And someone was lurking around out there when I let myself in. Did you see anybody?”
“Not a soul, Miss Cooper. Carry on, girl.”
“Did you see the alarm clock?”
“Not that I remember. Anything significant?”
“Just worth checking out the time of her usual schedule. It was last set for 5:30A.M. -we should note it in case it helps backtrack if we get any closer to knowing the time of the assault.”
“Done.” Mercer opened his pad and scratched in some notes. “Now, your video guy took some film in here, and we had Crime Scene go over it, too. George Zotos has been pouring through a lot of the files. Seems like she didn’t entertain here much. Used this living room more like an office. That whole wall unit to the left is full of books, but the one on the right is all files and stuff from the med school.
“We’ve been over a lot of it. Take your time, I’ll be here with you. Let me know if you want a picture of anything.”
I started back to the kitchen. Like mine, its shelves and cupboards were pretty bare. The standard upscale equipment-Cuisinart, Calphalon pots and pans, Henckel knives, and an imported espresso machine-all looked pitifully underutilized. This was the Gemma Dogen I could relate to.
“We’ve been through there, Coop. Zotos inventoried the fridge but then threw everything out. Skim milk, carrots, head of lettuce. You’re welcome to look, but it won’t tell you much.”
I walked back into the bedroom and sat in the armchair that was adjacent to Gemma’s bedside table. The bed was neatly made up and the spread was pulled tight without a crease. Either she had arisen at her usual time and straightened up after her jog or she had never gotten home during the night to go to sleep.
I picked up the book from the bedside table-a slim volume on spinal cord injuries, just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, which seemed as depressing as the task ahead of us. I looked at the pages that Gemma had dog-eared and underlined but they meant nothing to me and I replaced it under the lamp.
Closet doors were on runners, which I slid back to look at the way she presented herself to her world. On one side were dark suits with no trim or detail, utilitarian but not of any style. The other end was mostly casual gear-an assortment of khaki slacks, simple cotton shirts, and jackets. Running shoes and sneakers of every variety and condition covered the closet floor. Several pairs of solid English walking pumps must have carried her through her professional appointments. Sensible, my mother called them, but unexciting. A few white lab coats, cleaned and starched, hung between the business and the play clothes. My hand reached for the sleeve of a navy wool suit. I wondered if anyone had claimed Gemma’s body from the morgue and thought of taking an outfit for her burial.
I went back into the living room. Mercer stood up from the chair at Dogen’s desk, where he had been looking through some of the manila files that lay on top, and offered the seat to me.
“Here’s the mail that was left for her today. Doorman gave it to me on my way back up. Bills for Con Ed and cable TV, statement from Chase Bank, and a postcard from her ex on his trip to the Himalayas. Read it-looks like he expected to see her in England in a couple of weeks. Medical symposium at the University of London. Take that with us to give to Peterson, okay?”
“Fine.” I looked it over, pleased that she had such a civilized relationship with Geoffrey that he actually expressed pleasure at the idea of seeing her soon. Most of my friends didn’t enjoy that status with their exes, a thought that had me smiling until I caught myself with the sad realization that Geoffrey might not yet even know Gemma’s monstrous fate.
Mercer moved over to study the bookshelf wall. With his usual eye for detail, he started listing titles and descriptions as I opened desk drawers to flip through agendas and calendars.
“This lady was serious, Cooper. Very little here that isn’t medical or strictly business. Small collection of classics, kind of stuff you like. George Eliot, Thomas Hardy. Then you move to the CDs. Lots of German opera, plenty of Bach. Can you imagine a music collection without a single piece of jazz or even one Motown disc? Too whitebread for me, girl.”
“I don’t think I noticed, Mercer. Is there a computer in her office?” I was surprised not to find one in the apartment.
“Yeah, they’re working on downloading that, too. She didn’t keep one here, which is why it wouldn’t have been unusual to see her in the med school office so late. When we were there yesterday morning, practically everyone we spoke to said Dogen liked to do her writing late at night, when it was really quiet over there. Unfortunately, anyone who knew her knew that.”
I slid the chair over to the wall opposite the one Mercer was facing. The lower half of the cabinets were file drawers, each hung with legal-size Pendaflex folders. Some were divided by color and all were split up by year. Beyond that, I could make no particular sense of the order or subject matter. Like Mercer, I held onto my legal pad and tried to make notes about what categories the documents covered.
“For such a logical lady, some of this makes no sense. I can’t imagine her system for finding stuff. She’s got scores of folders on ‘Professional Ethics’-”
“Yeah, that was one of her areas of expertise, Coop. She gave a lot of lectures about it.”
“Well, wedged in between that and a couple of folders on ‘Regenerative Tissue’ is her file on ‘Met Games.’ ”
“She was quite a jock, apparently.”
“Yeah, but Laura Wilkie could have straightened out her life a bit. Organized everything. You go in looking to renew your baseball season tickets and it’s somewhere in the middle of brain tissue. Two file drawers later you get to all the stuff about running equipment. Uh, uh-Laura wouldn’t stand for it. She’d have all the brain material in one place and the sports files in another.”
I was getting bleary-eyed from looking through file labels and listings. I had wanted to get a sense of Gemma Dogen and, beyond that, none of these documents would have any meaning unless they surfaced later as a piece of the investigation.
Mercer was photographing the items on the desktop as I stood up and stretched my back. “I’ll just take a few shots so we can keep the context of how we found things.”