Last Dance, Last Chance

police work, although it would take more than a year of physical therapy to bring back the use of his arm. His physical therapists didn’t think he could do it, and they were amazed.
    “We realized that the only grandparents our children had were in Buffalo, so we came home,” Craven recalled. “I got to play softball with my father. It was a good move.”
    Craven was hired by the Erie County D.A.’s office in1989. Until then, he had investigated accidents and narcotics, but now he would be tracking every kind of criminal there was. Craven also became a certified fingerprint examiner and an expert at drawing crime scenes to scale.
    Between them, Craven and Finnerty would handle everything from bunco to murder for hire. Each case they were assigned to had a different spin, but one or the other of them had the experience to winnow out the truth. Together, they were formidable. Now, they were about to learn a great deal about the practice of medicine.
     
    On September 3, 1997, Pat Finnerty and Chuck Craven knew only that Sarah Smith had died during what was allegedly a routine procedure in Dr. Anthony Pignataro’s office. They needed to interview all the office staff who had been present, as well as the paramedics and EMTs who had responded to the 911 call the morning of August 25.
    They found Janie Krauss first. A very pretty young woman, she was the very epitome of what blond jokes portray. She hadn’t mastered the correct terminology for techniques or medical instruments, and the two detectives exchanged dumbfounded looks while Janie struggled to explain what had happened.
    Janie said she had arrived late on that Monday morning, and that Sarah Smith was already in the basement surgery, conscious but drowsy from preoperative pills. She said that Sarah had been given 20 milligrams of Valium before her surgery. Janie’s assignment was to inject the anesthesia into a port in the tube to the patient’s arm. She had given sodium pentothal 6 cubic centimeters, and then Versed, 3 cubic centimeters. Janie wasn’t sure what those were for. She thought it was to control pain. Dr. Pignataro had then asked her to inject a second syringe of sodium pentothal, 7 cubic centimeters, into the port.
    Janie said she had been present for a dozen other operations like this one, although she couldn’t remember the name of this procedure. “He started with that sharp thing—I forget what it’s called…” Janie began.
    “A scalpel?” Finnerty asked.
    She nodded. “That’s it—and then he put this thing in and he was tunneling under her skin. It’s like a hockey stick…”
    “A hockey stick?” Finnerty echoed, amazed.
    They realized later that the expander Anthony had used to burrow under the patient’s skin was shaped like a hockey stick.
    Sarah Smith had said “Ouch” several times, and the doctor had told Janie to give her a third dose of sodium pentothal—7 cubic centimeters.
    The two D.A.’s investigators didn’t know much about anesthetic substances, and they nodded, unaware that this third injection was an excessive amount.
    Janie explained that Debbie Pignataro had been in the operating room, and that a boy from the Nichols School named Tom had been there, too. She didn’t know his last name.
    Within a few moments after the third injection, the pulseox on Sarah’s forefinger began to sound the way it did if the oxygen level fell too low, below 85. Janie said the blood pressure monitor went off, too. She had tried to read the blood pressure and gotten nothing, and then tried to get a manual blood pressure reading, but she couldn’t do that either.
    “What does it mean when the pulse-ox hits 85?” Craven asked.
    “I don’t know,” Janie said in a puzzled voice. “I just know that when it hits 85, it isn’t a good sign.”
    She remembered that they had all worked over the woman on the table, trying to get her to breathe again, but she didn’t know for how long.
    Now Janie Krauss told them that the doctor had asked that the patient be hooked up to the electrocardiogram. “There was just a flat line. And he didn’t have a ‘Bamboo Bag.’”
    “What’s that?” Finnerty asked.
    “You know—that little masky thing you put over someone’s face when you want them to breathe?”
    “Like an oxygen mask?”
    “That’s it!” As Janie tried to explain it, the two detectives realized that she meant an Ambu-Bag, necessary to intubate the patient in an effort to give her oxygen. If it hadn’t