Fatal Reaction

phone with Julia Gordon,” he said.
    Julia Gordon had been a classmate of Stephen’s in medical school. Now a forensic pathologist with the medical examiner’s office, she lived in Hyde Park with her husband, Hugh, who was a professor of hematology at U of C. Stephen had been trying to recruit him to Azor for years.
    “She called to apologize about the mix-up in releasing Danny’s body yesterday. She says it’s chaos over there on account of this Sarrek thing. The pathologist who performed the autopsy on Danny isn’t even on their regular staff; he’s on loan from DuPage County.”
    “So what did she have to say about cause of death?”
    “Danny died from a bleeding ulcer.”
    “What?”
    “She says they found an ulcer that eroded into one of the major blood vessels in the stomach.”
    “You’re kidding,” I said, leaning back in my chair trying to absorb this information, trying to make it fit with the mental picture of Danny’s apartment that I seemed destined to carry around with me forever. “I still don’t get it. If he was bleeding into a hole in his stomach, then wouldn’t he have died from internal bleeding? How would blood from a bleeding ulcer get all over the apartment?”
    “Blood is an irritant, Kate.”
    “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
    “Blood is an irritant. As soon as there was a significant amount in his stomach Danny would have started vomiting it up. He wouldn’t have stopped until all the blood was gone.”
    “Oh,” I said weakly, my hand involuntarily rising to cover my mouth in what no doubt looked like a cartoon of well-bred shock. I took a deep breath and tried to push down the horrific images crowding into my head. “It was almost easier to deal with the thought of him having been murdered—”
    “Oh, he was murdered, all right,” Stephen cut in coldly. “There is absolutely no doubt of that.”
    “What?”
    “Oh, maybe it’s not murder within the legal requirements, but he was murdered nonetheless.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Think about it, Kate. Bleeding to death is a process, not an instantaneous event. Even if the hole in the blood vessel were huge it would have probably taken between ten and fifteen minutes for him to have bled out completely. At that rate he would have still had five or six minutes on his feet before he’d start to get weak and lose motor coordination. After that he’d go into shock and lose consciousness.”
    Suddenly I understood how Danny’s apartment had come to look the way it did. I saw the arcing bloodstains and felt almost physically sick.
    “Danny was intelligent, physically capable, and in an apartment that contained a working telephone in a building full of people,” continued Stephen relentlessly. “Why didn’t he use the telephone to call for an ambulance? Why didn’t he run out into the hallway to get help? If medical help had gotten to him quickly enough there was a good chance they could have saved him.”
    “It wasn’t that he didn’t try,” I replied, thinking of the bloody wall by the kitchen door and the pool of blood by the fallen telephone. “Danny tried with everything he had. But whoever was with him in the apartment forcibly restrained him. That’s how the apartment got tom apart. It wasn’t because someone was trying to kill him. It was because whoever was with him when he started to die physically held him down to keep him from going for help.”
     

CHAPTER 13
     
    For a long time we just kept going over it, laying out the few nuggets of hard fact we had, hoping there was some way of putting them together that told a different, less terrible story. But in the end it always came out the same way. While Danny was bleeding to death someone had wrestled him down to keep him from summoning help.
    “But why?” I asked for the dozenth time. “Do you think maybe he just panicked at the sight of the blood?”
    “If that were the case you’d expect him to stand back or even run away. The last thing you’d think he’d want to do is get any closer. No, whoever did this wanted Danny dead.”
    “If he’d gotten help right away do you think Danny would have lived?”
    “If the paramedics were able to get there quickly, then yes, there’s a good chance he would be alive right now.”
    “Maybe whoever was with him didn’t know that. Did Danny have a living will? Maybe he’d told whoever was with him that he didn’t want to be resuscitated if something happened to him.”
    “Danny