He gave me a funny look, obviously unsure why I’d brought this up. “Yeah?”
“Well, if you know how dangerous it is to be addicted, then why’d you do that?”
“I didn’t use heroin, Penny,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “That one’s really bad, huh?”
He laughed at me, shaking his head. “You don’t know anything about drug addiction, do you?”
I shrugged. “Only a little, I guess.”
“There’s addiction and then there’s addiction,” he said. “Heroin addiction is… Well, I’ve never quite hated myself that much. I’ve hated myself a lot. I mean, that’s how I got messed up with the Bryant clan to begin with. Just didn’t much care what happened to me. Ready to try anything.”
“Not anything,” I said. “Not if you wouldn’t do heroin.”
“Almost anything,” he said.
“I’m glad you don’t hate yourself like that anymore,” I said.
His gaze flitted away from mine.
“You don’t, do you?”
“No,” he said hoarsely, still not looking at me. “No, I… you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and you know that.”
I pressed close to him.
He put his arm around me.
We were quiet.
We stared at the whiteboard.
“Get a room, you two,” said Christy.
I turned. “Hey there, what are you doing here after hours?”
“Could ask you the same question,” she said.
“Well, we’re staying late to make up for the fact that we got in late,” said Lachlan. “What’s your excuse?”
“Oh, you know. Just trying to make heads or tails of my case.”
“Thought you were practically done with that,” said Lachlan.
“Thought so,” she said. “And then everything went sideways.” She nodded at our whiteboard. “Why don’t you guys run me through what’s up with yours? Maybe that’ll help me jog my head into finding a new angle on mine.”
“Not much to say, actually,” said Lachlan, heading up to the board. He took the picture of Dashiell and stuck it at the bottom of the board. “We’re deprioritizing him.”
“How come?” said Christy.
“Well, he was hiding his drug habit, and that’s maybe why he was so shifty,” said Lachlan. “But we don’t have anything definitively linking him to the crime.”
I nodded. “We’re keeping him on the back burner. But I don’t think he did it.”
Lachlan picked up the picture of Paloma. “We’re moving her up the list.” He stuck Paloma up in Dashiell’s old spot. “And…” He reached back, opened his desk drawer and came up with a picture of Henry Gilbert. “This guy’s going on the board, too.” He used a magnet to stick Henry on the board.
“Who’s he?” said Christy.
“He’s the former owner of the victim,” said Lachlan. “Hates gargoyles. Thinks of them as property. Still seems to hold a grudge for the victim’s part in bringing about gargoyle emancipation.”
“Horrible man,” I said.
“But I thought these were your only suspects because they’re the ones who came into the room,” said Christy.
“Right,” said Lachlan. “And if Henry did it, then he either used the nurse—” He tapped the picture of Sierra on the board. “Or he used the niece.” He tapped the picture of Paloma.
“Why the niece?” said Christy.
“She had a monogrammed handkerchief with the Gilbert name on it,” I said. “And she got really twitchy when we asked questions about it.”
Christy arched an eyebrow. “That’s thin.”
“No, you should have seen it,” said Lachlan. “Besides, she’s been tough to work with this entire investigation. We’ve had all kinds of trouble with her.”
“Even thinner,” said Christy. “What do you have on the nurse?”
“Nothing,” said Lachlan.
“Well, you haven’t checked into her story,” I said. “You don’t even know if she’s hiding something or not.”
Lachlan rolled his eyes. “Penny’s got an ax to grind for the nurse.”
“I don’t have an ax to grind,” I said. “I only think that she’s hiding something.”
“Well,” said Lachlan. “I tell you what. I’ll look into the nurse first thing in the morning, okay?”
“Morning?” said Christy. “What are you going to do now?”
Lachlan yawned. “Go home. We didn’t even get to see our son tonight.”
“Oh, we’ll probably see him,” I said. “I bet you anything that Connor couldn’t get him to sleep. Wyatt will only go to sleep at night with a boob in his mouth.”
Christy wrinkled up her nose.
I patted her shoulder. “Sorry about that visual. But, you know, it’s what breasts are for.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “No,” she said. “No, it’s not. And I say this both as a woman and a lover of women.” She turned to Lachlan. “Back me up here.”
He cleared his throat. “Oh, I have no complaints about the milk thing.”
“Lachlan,” I said in a tight voice. I could feel myself blushing.
Christy guffawed. She pressed her fingers to her lips.
“And we’re leaving,” I said, dragging him away. I glared at him. “You can’t say things like that.”
* * *
“Okay, okay, so maybe you’re not wrong about Sierra,” Lachlan was saying from his desk at the office.
It was the next morning, and I was exhausted, because, as I’d predicted, Wyatt had not been asleep when we got home. He had been fussy and tough to put down, and then had been up for nearly two hours in the middle of the night. I felt like death warmed over. I half-wished we’d taken the vampire gang murder. Then we wouldn’t have had to interview half our suspects after the sun went down.
I peered over at him from the desk where I’d been doing some research on the Gilbert clan. “Huh? What are you talking about?”
At that moment, Christy strolled back towards us. “Guess what?”
We both looked up.
“What?” said Lachlan.
“I closed the case.” She collapsed in her chair, grinning widely. “I just have a little paperwork to wrap up and then I’m done, done, done.”
“Wow,” I said. “Because last night…”
“Yeah,” she said. “I was sitting here thinking it through for hours last night, just pursuing different angles and I was getting nowhere. Then boom! Got in my car to drive home, and suddenly, it all came together. I double-checked some evidence this morning, and it fit with my new theory, and then I went out to question the new suspect, and he confessed under pressure. Just like that. I felt like I was you, Flint.”
Lachlan laughed.
“Seriously, I never get them to confess like that,” she said. “You must be rubbing off on me.”
“I do what I can,” he said.
“So,” she said, sitting up, “what’s wrong with you lazy bones, hmm? How come you haven’t close your case yet?”
“Because our case is complicated,” said Lachlan.
“Because you guys think handkerchiefs are significant,” she said.
“The handkerchief was monogrammed with the name of the people that owned her family,” I said. “That is significant.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Any luck on that nurse?”
“Actually,” said Lachlan, “I was just going to tell Penny that her instincts may be right on this.”
“Oh, really?” I said. “I’m right? I’m never right.”
“Well, it’s too soon to say if she’s the killer or not,” said Lachlan, “but she’s lying about her past.”
“No way,” I said. “What did she lie about?”
“She said that she’d never had a patient die on her, right?” said Lachlan. “Because she worked in labor and delivery.”
“Yeah, I remember saying that.”
“Well, she never worked in
labor and delivery. She worked with terminally ill patients, and lots and lots of her patients died.”
“No way,” I said.
“Yep,” said Lachlan, looking pleased with himself.
“Why are you grinning?” I demanded. “I’m the one who had the feeling about her.”
“Yeah, but I did the actual grunt work,” he said.
I sputtered. “You told me that I shouldn’t look into her, because I’d be biased and try to find things that would make her look guilty!”
He just laughed. “You’re cute when you get mad, Penny.”
I got up out of my chair. “You know what? Forget it. I don’t need to be here. I could go home.”
“Hey, wait,” he said, grabbing my sleeve and tugging me back into my chair. “I was just teasing you.”
“Your husband is an ass,” said Christy.
“I know,” I said, glowering at him. Lachlan wasn’t technically my husband, but I didn’t see the point in correcting her. After all, we were very committed to each other. It was like a marriage.
“I’m sorry.” Lachlan made puppy dog eyes at me. “Forgive me?”
“Whatever,” I said. “Why do you think she lied?”
“Well, she’s trying to hide something,” said Lachlan. “Why would she want to hide the fact that other patients have died on her watch?”
“Probably because she killed them, and she doesn’t want us to find that out,” I said. “And because she also killed Beckett.”
“But if she did that,” said Christy, “then that would make her like a serial killer or something, wouldn’t it? And as Lachlan has informed us, women don’t do that.”
“I never said that,” said Lachlan.
“I think you did,” said Christy.
“I said that women who kill serially aren’t motivated by sexual control of their victims. Not all men who kill serially are either. Some male serial killers are, but there are no female serial killers with that m.o.,” said Lachlan.
“Oh, now you’re just backtracking,” said Christy. “Anyway, I don’t see why you’re so sexist about all this. A women could be a sexually motivated killer.”
“Sure, in theory,” said Lachlan. “We’ve never caught one.”
“Because women are smarter than men,” said Christy.
Lachlan lifted his chin. “Now who’s being sexist?”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Guys,” I said. “Let’s not fight about this. You think she’s a serial killer, Lachlan? After everything, this is another serial killing case?”
He shrugged. “Could be. Could be that there was no reason to kill Beckett other than to put him out of his misery.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“They call this kind of killer an angel of death or an angel of mercy,” said Lachlan. “There are a couple different branches of the psychosis. Some people who do it have a kind of professional Munchausen by proxy.”
“That’s when you pretend your kids are sick for the attention, right?” I said.
“Simplifying it a bit, but essentially,” said Lachlan. “It can be much worse than pretending a child is sick. One might harm, even kill, for attention. Sometimes, doctors or nurses will do something to kill a patient just so that they can attempt to save them and look like a hero.”
“They look like a hero even though the person dies?” said Christy.
“Apparently,” said Lachlan, “or no one would do it.”
“Well, that didn’t happen with Beckett,” I said. “No one tried to save him.”
“No,” said Lachlan. “The other kind of angel of death killing is generally done because the killer thinks that the people are suffering so much that they’d be better off if they were dead. It’s a ‘mercy’ killing.”
“But… Beckett wasn’t that sick,” I said.
“I thought you had a feeling about Sierra,” he said.
“I do,” I said. “It doesn’t fit the pattern, though.”
“Well,” said Lachlan, “and I’m just spitballing here, but maybe she worked in hospice and was killing people left and right, and felt guilty, so she got herself transferred. And she thought that if she was in a place where it wouldn’t be so commonplace for people to die, that would be a deterrent to killing. Help her stop. But she couldn’t resist.”
“Or maybe,” said Christy, “she transferred because it would be more of a challenge to kill people who weren’t already on death’s door. Maybe she kills because she gets a charge out of it, and she just says she kills to put them out of their misery.”
“Could be,” said Lachlan.
Christy raised her eyebrows. “You’re agreeing with me?”
“Sometimes you do say intelligent things,” said Lachlan, grinning at her.
She narrowed her eyes. “And sometimes you’re only half a jackass.”
* * *
“You got anything?” I asked Christy.
She shook her head. “Well, considering most of the cases weren’t even looked into, because the person was dying anyway, no, I don’t have anything.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m coming up mostly empty too.”
“It’s a long shot we’d find anything anyhow,” said Lachlan, sighing. “You’re right, Christy, they aren’t even looking into the deaths. She could have been injecting people with Periklur willy-nilly and there’d be no record if no one thought to look.”
“I did find one weird thing,” I said.
“What?” said Lachlan.
“Well, it happened just before she transferred to the hospital here,” I said, and I clicked back to the tab on the computer that had the results on it. “There was a terminal patient and there was an investigation because there was a lot of Vixodine found in her system. Althea Larsen was the patient’s name.”
“That’s a painkiller, right?” said Lachlan. “Can it be fatal?”
“In high enough doses,” I said.
“Huh,” said Christy. “So… what came of the investigation?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Apparently, she was prescribed the drug, and the levels weren’t out of the realm of possibility to have been in her system, even though they did seem unusually high. But there wasn’t enough evidence to go forward. The, um, investigation was apparently leveled by the insurance company, who was trying to prove that it was a suicide and that they shouldn’t have to pay for medical costs.”
“Oh, what a dick move,” said Christy. “From the insurance company, I mean.”
“Totally,” I said.
“But maybe it was a murder,” said Lachlan. “And maybe this is actually the thing that drove her to transfer.”
“Well, I do think there was a bit of a scandal,” I said. “She was accused of possibly being careless and giving the patient an overdose or of allowing the patient access to the drug so that she could kill herself. But Sierra was cleared. Still, I guess she might have felt as if she wasn’t safe there anymore.”
“Yeah, leaving the job is a typical move in the face of something like that,” said Lachlan.
“But,” I said, “she could have left because she had nearly been caught.”
“Because maybe she did overdose the patient,” said Christy. “Only on purpose.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sierra got a pinched look on her face when she saw us. “You two again? Is there really anything else that you want to ask me?”
“Oh, we’ve got quite a bit to discuss,” said Lachlan.
She sighed. “I’m busy today. I don’t really have time to talk. Maybe you could come back later? Towards the end of my shift or something?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lachlan. “I think we should have this out right now.”
“Well,” said Sierra. “I’ve got rounds to do. So, if you want to ask me questions, you just have to follow me around.” She swept out from behind the counter and began striding down the hospital hallway.
“Althea Larsen,” Lachlan called after her.
<
br /> Sierra froze in place. She turned to look at us, her features frigid. “Where did you hear that name?”
Lachlan and I caught up to her. “You told us you used to work as a labor and delivery nurse. You lied.”
Sierra cringed.
Lachlan gestured. “Do you want to talk about this in the hallway?”
She sighed. “I don’t have an office. But there’s usually no one in the patient waiting room on this floor. Come on.” She led us down the hallway and around the bend.
We turned into a doorway and entered a waiting room with a paisley couch and a fake plant next to a throw rug. It had that trying-to-hard-to-look-homey appearance, the way most hospital waiting rooms do.
Sierra sat down on the couch. She shut her eyes and dragged her hands over her face.
Lachlan sat down on the couch next to her. “Why don’t you tell me all about what happened, Sierra?” His voice had gone low and lilting.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “There’s nothing to tell. What happened to Althea has nothing to do with what happened to Beckett.”
“But you’re upset about Althea,” said Lachlan.
“She’s the reason why I had to leave my job,” said Sierra. “I loved working hospice and I had to stop, all because of what happened with Althea. It wasn’t fair. They ruled that nothing out of the ordinary happened. And yet the hospice didn’t want me around anymore. They made it clear that if I didn’t leave, they’d make the rest of my time there pretty awful. I didn’t feel as though I had a choice. I left.”
“That’s not the only reason you’re upset about Althea,” said Lachlan. “After all, you and I both know that you did what you did to her for her own good.”
Sierra stiffened. “I didn’t do anything,” she said in a tiny voice.
“Oh, come on,” said Lachlan, leaning close. “Of course you did. Wouldn’t it feel good to talk to someone about it?”
“To you?” said Sierra. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not me?” said Lachlan, smiling at her. “I’m a good guy. And I think I might understand. She was dying, wasn’t she? She was in pain?”
“Stop,” said Sierra. “Just stop. I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t want to talk to you people about it. She died, that’s all. She just died.”
Fire Brand (City of Dragons Book 6) Page 13