It all began one cold and dreary midnight early in the new year. The shift change in technical staff at the busy New York hospital had just occurred and Mrs. Maria Greer was settling in to her round of duties as late night supervisor of the Blood Bank. She had just returned to her desk from filling a request for two pints of A negative blood for the Operating Room when a loud noise caught her attention. Following the direction of the sound and a trail of blood that led from the storage area, she found the crumpled body of 60 -year-old Thomas Borg lying beside a file cabinet in the Chief of Staff's inner office.
Two storage units had been emptied of their contents, marking a strange culmination in a rash of 'blood robberies' in the last few months. Many bags of plasma, both from a recent blood drive and from the Blood Bank's internal supply, had been reported missing to the hospital's Chief of Staff, James Lundy, who was conducting his own investigation into the matter. Unexplained orders for all the blood emanated from the computer at the Blood Bank's main desk, yet no one would claim responsibility for having typed them.
It was Mrs. Maria Greer who summoned Lieutenant Ross Hamlin of The Homicide Squad to the bloody scene. Thomas Borg, custodian, had been stabbed repeatedly, but why the killer had transported his body from the storage room to Lundy's office was a mystery. Surely it could only have been risky to move the corpse under the very noses of the blood bank staff. Hamlin surmised that the answer had to do with the fact that where the body had originally lain, it blocked access to the two storage units. There was blood splatter all across the glass tops. He knew the killing had to be connected to the missing bags of plasma. But how?
An autopsy determined that the cause of death was multiple stab wounds inflicted by a pair of scissors stamped with the Blood Bank logo. The police found them next to a pair of discarded surgical gloves and an empty cooler on the back stairway that led from Lundy's office down to the first floor lobby. Perhaps the killer had meant to drag the body there where it might remain out of sight for a while longer and then thought better of it. In any case, hopes that latent fingerprints on the gloves, scissors or cooler might move the search for the killer along died quickly.
