The carolers didn’t stay long. “O Come All Ye Faithful” was followed by a brief chorus of “Silent Night” that segued quickly into just enough “Jingle Bells” for Reverend Johnson to feel certain that they were including something for the agnostics. When the song was over, the deputies and carolers alike dissolved into a round of applause, and after a few words about the spirit of the season, Reverend Johnson led the group off. Judy and the boys stayed behind for just a moment to greet Maggie. Andy was a font of happy questions. “Did you hear me, Mom?” She’d heard him. “Were you surprised?” Very. Andy followed up with a volley of news about their plans for the rest of the day, peppering in questions about what she was doing, when she’d be done, and wouldn’t it be a good idea to open a present with the cousins tonight.
Maggie knelt in the snow to hug her son. “Yeah, honey,” she told him. “We’ll open a present tonight.”
With that, the four were gone, and Maggie was alone again.
The afternoon crept by, and there was little Maggie could do but wait and worry. Around one o’clock, Neal got a call from Dr. Caldwell. Maggie couldn’t hear Dr. Caldwell’s end, so at first she had only Neal’s facial expressions to judge the contents of the conversation. When Neal hung up, he took a moment just to sit in silence and process what he’d heard. “What’s the word, man?” Maggie said finally.
“Seems that for now the tox screen is inconclusive.”
“Dammit.”
“Well, apparently that’s what she was expecting. Even with the whiz kid there, there was only so much they get hammered down for sure without more testing.”
“Okay,” Maggie replied.
“They also examined Lucinda again for needle marks,” Neal continued. “They examined her pretty closely the first time, but according to the doc, that syringe you found is what they call a ‘butterfly needle.’ They use it on babies for IVs, I guess. It’s fitted with one of the smallest gauge needles you can find. It would be just the thing to use if you didn’t want to leave any evidence of a needle puncture.” Neal winced. “Sure enough, she didn’t find anything.”
Maggie shook her head. “Dammit,” she said. “So, we got nothing.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Neal replied. “The tox screen and the syringe were the doc’s long shots. Seems she had an ace up her sleeve. See, it turns out that Lucinda was AB-negative.”
“Oh?” Maggie replied, a note of hope in her voice. “That’s good?”
“Damn right it is,” Neal replied. “AB-negative is the rarest blood type in the United States. Only something like 1 in 300 people have it. The doc pointed it out to me the other day, but I’ve been chasing down so many other angles, it just slipped my mind.”
Maggie put her hand to her mouth. She, too, had been thinking only in terms of the toxicology. “The syringe,” she said. “There was blood in the syringe.”
Neal smiled. “Exactly. We don’t know for sure if we’ve got this propofol stuff in Lucinda’s tox screen, but the likelihood that there’s some of Lucinda’s blood in that syringe… well, let’s say the odds are in our favor.” Neal smiled.
“I’ll be damned, Neal,” she said with a grin. “This has got to be enough to dislodge Hennyson’s head from his ass.”
Neal nodded thoughtfully. “Only one way to find out.” He picked up the phone and placed the call.
Maggie recalled the hassle Neal had gone through getting Hennyson earlier, so she figured she had a minute or two to herself. She took a bathroom break, then stopped in the break room for fresh cups of coffee for Neal and herself. The news of Doctor Caldwell’s discovery still quickened Maggie’s pulse, so she probably didn’t need the caffeine, but with any luck, they’d be mobile before long, and she was still a little blinky from the shortened night of sleep she’d gotten. She was on her way back to Neal’s office when Henry called to her from the front desk. “It’s somebody calling from Coalton General for Neal, but his line’s tied up. A Stan something-or-other. Sounds important.”
“It is,” Maggie replied. She nearly spilled the drinks in her hurry to get to the phone, and she snatched the receiver out of Henry’s hand. “This is Deputy Dell speaking.”
The voice on the other end barely had to speak three words before Maggie recognized the thin tones of peevishness she’d encountered first that morning. “Hi. This is Stan Lincoln calling from Coalton General. I’m looking for Sheriff Graham.”
“Yes, Mr. Lincoln, this is Deputy Dell.” She tried a more familiar tack. “Maggie, Mr. Lincoln. We met this morning.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re the… uh, I remember now.” Maggie felt the unspoken words lady cop hanging in the air so clearly that they were almost visible. She put them aside. “So you know what the sheriff asked me to look up.”
“I do, indeed. Did you get the information?”
“I… well, it wasn’t in the new system,” Stan replied. Maggie felt a filibuster coming on. “I was hoping it would be there, but you know how it is.”
“I sure do, Mr. Lincoln.” Maggie rubbed her eyes. She felt the first hints of a headache building. “So, what did you find?”
There was an uncomfortable pause. “Well… I thought I was supposed to… is Sheriff Graham there?”
“He’s on another line, but it’s okay. I’m working this case with him.”
“Oh,” Stan said flatly. Another pause. “It’s just I thought I should give it to him.”
Maggie felt her temper rising, but she checked it before it could get into her voice. “I understand your hesitation, Stan,” she said, “but this is actually quite pressing. I’ll tell you what: I’ve got Sara Mahaney’s home phone number here. I’m pretty sure she has the grandkids in for the holiday, but she was pretty concerned with this homicide investigation, so why don’t I give her a call—”
“Uh, that’s okay,” Stan replied. “Let me just check… okay, the unit number you provided was signed out by one of our RNs. A Kindler. Shawn Kindler.”
Silence. Maggie couldn’t respond.
“Deputy?” Stan said after a long moment.
“Yes, I… okay, Mr. Lincoln. No, that’s… that’s all we needed.”
Lincoln disconnected, but even with the dead line in her hand, Maggie froze for a moment. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself.
They had him.
Maggie left the coffee on the front desk and hurried down the hall to Neal’s office. Inside, she found Neal on the line, his voice raised in frustration. “Yeah, Alec, I know how it looks in the paper if we don’t have all our ducks in a row.” Neal’s eyes were closed, and he held a hand up to his forehead and massaged his temples with his thumb. Apparently Maggie wasn’t the only one with a headache coming on. “But Kindler gets custody of the girl the day after tomorrow, man. We got a week to ten days to wait. Say it comes back positive—which you know it will—and this son of a bitch leaves town in the meantime? How do you think that’s gonna look for you?”
Hennyson’s voice was a tiny electronic rattle from where Maggie was standing, but it was loud enough for Maggie to hear that he was frustrated. Nevertheless, when Neal glanced up and saw the look on Maggie’s face, he flicked the mute button and put the receiver down without hesitation. “What is it, Maggie?”
Maggie was still shocked enough that she stammered at first. “It’s Lincoln, boss. From Coalton General. The propofol. It was Kindler’s.” Neal stared uncomprehendingly at first. He knew all the words Maggie was saying, but he didn’t know how to accept what they all meant together. So Maggie tried again. “Kindler signed that propofol out, Neal. Under his own damned name.” She smiled. “We got him.”
Neal blinked. It took him a long moment to consider the news before he seemed to understand it, but when he did, he laughed in shock. “Son of a bitch, Maggie, we got him.”
Sheriff Graham only took another moment to consider his actions. Then, he switched the phone off mute, cut in on the rattle of Hennyson’s voice, and gave him the news in the briefest possible soun
d bite. “We got the pharmacy records. It’s Kindler’s.”
Silence from the other end. Hennyson, too, needed a moment to understand what had happened. Then, there was a short rattle from Hennyson’s end. “Yeah,” Neal said. “That’s what I’m thinking, too, Alec. You get on back to the slopes, good buddy. I’ll take it from here.”
With that Neal put the phone back in the cradle, grabbed his lighter and cigarettes from his desk, and arose from his chair as though it were catching fire underneath him. “All right, Maggie,” he said as he pulled on his coat and headed for the door, “what say we give this bastard the Christmas behind bars he so richly deserves?”
And they were off.
When Maggie and Neal left the office, it was around 2:30, and the afternoon was bitterly cold. The sign outside the Bluegrass Farmers Credit Union read ten degrees Fahrenheit, and Maggie was pretty certain that it tended to run four or five degrees warm, sometimes more when the temperatures plummeted in January and February. Maggie found her thoughts straying to Andy and whether he had been bundled up enough when she’d seen him earlier in the day, but the thought brought a wave of emotions up in her that she couldn’t handle at the moment, so she turned her mind back to Kindler.
Neal’s initial plan was to pick him up at his house. However, when they pulled onto his street, Kindler’s gray Toyota pickup was nowhere to be seen. Neal was cautious. He didn’t want to risk a friend or neighbor noticing them at the house and tipping Kindler off, so they decided to cruise town on what they hoped would look like a standard patrol to scout for the truck. Kindler was known to spend some time at a local bowling alley and had a few other hangouts, but since it was Christmas Eve, not much more than the grocery stores and gas stations were open. After taking a pass through town, they decided the next best plan would have to do. They knew Kindler would arrive at seven for the night shift at Coalton General. “It’d be sweet to cuff him on his own porch,” Neal opined, “but doing it in front of his co-workers won’t be bad either.”
To pass the time, they stopped by Sally’s and had breakfast for dinner. Maggie’s internal clock was spinning out of sync with reality after her nearly sleepless night, so pancakes sounded as good as anything else. They sat in Neal’s usual booth and ate mostly in silence, though at one point, Neal sized Maggie up thoughtfully and said, “You never told me what you saw out there on the Little Horn last night.”
But Maggie ended up not knowing what to say. She gave him a brief rundown, but nothing more detailed than what she would say about writing a traffic ticket. Somehow, Maggie felt that what had happened last night was something personal between her and Lucinda. When she thought back on the mournful moan of Lucinda’s voice, a loneliness rose up in Maggie that she didn’t know how to share, not with Neal, nor anyone else. In the end, Maggie could only shake her head. “I think she got what she was looking for,” Maggie said finally. Then, on a whim, she picked up the pack of cigarettes next to Neal’s cup of coffee. Winstons. They had been Jerry’s brand as well. She tapped one from the pack and fired it up. “Don’t know for sure,” she said thoughtfully, “but I don’t think she’ll be coming back.”
Neal sat in silence for a moment and considered Maggie thoughtfully. He looked like he had something big to say, but after considering it for a moment, he just smiled. “Careful,” he said, pointing to Maggie’s cigarette. “Those’ll kill you, sister.”
Maggie coughed, smiled. “Not tonight they won’t.”
By the time they left for Coalton, it was full dark, and the cold afternoon had given way to an even colder evening. Neal pulled his cruiser into the back end of the lot in order to keep a low profile, and as they made their way through the lot, Neal spotted Kindler’s pickup parked right next to a streetlight. No one was around, so Neal stopped next to the Toyota and peered inside, casually at first. Then something caught his attention. “Whoa,” he said under his breath.
“What is it?” Maggie asked.
Neal pointed to the passenger seat. The bright halogen light of the streetlamp lit it up like noon, and Maggie saw instantly what Neal meant. On the seat was a Rand McNally road atlas. “Look at that,” Neal said, squinting slightly to read the fine print in the subtitle. “Oh, Pacific Northwest. That’s a nice trip. And just a hop, skip and a jump from there into Canada.” Neal shook his head. “That son of a bitch.”
Though the night was bitter, a shiver ran through Maggie that had nothing to do with the cold. “Lord,” she muttered. “Let’s get him collared already.”
Neal nodded. “Let’s do.”
Inside, the two set out for Intensive Care. They’d learned earlier in the week that Kindler was filling in for someone in the ICU, and he was supposed to be on the third floor for the rest of the week. They took the rear elevator, thinking Kindler would be less apt to see them coming from that direction.
However, the third floor was something of a maze. They spotted a few other nurses and a physician looking over charts at a nurse’s station, but Kindler was nowhere to be found. As they scoured the brightly lit halls, the headache Maggie had begun to feel coming on earlier flared up again, riding a wave of wild anxiety.
Something didn’t feel right.
After a casual sweep of the floor, Neal looked stumped for a moment. A nurse posted at the station near the entrance had clearly noticed them. She was fortyish with prematurely gray hair, and her brow was furrowed suspiciously. The moment he noticed her, Neal switched on the charm with a familiar bright smile that he sometimes called his “Sunday go-to-meeting face,” and he made his way over to the counter.
Maggie could hear what they were saying, but the anxiety swelling inside her rendered the words meaningless. Something wasn’t right. Maggie felt it in her gut. Standing at the intersection of three hallways, Maggie scanned them each, her anxiety turning to panic.
Something just wasn’t right.
As she turned from hallway to hallway, Maggie noticed that she was standing next to a window with a wide view of the parking lot from which they had come. A notion hit her seemingly out of the blue, and she stepped up to the window to peer down.
Maggie scanned the lot quickly, her panic now in full bloom. Surely she had it wrong. But she located Neal’s cruiser, and from that point traced the route they’d taken to Kindler’s truck.
The pickup was gone.
Maggie didn’t mean to shout, but her voice came in a bark. “Neal!”
Neal turned, his Sunday go-to-meeting face falling at sound of Maggie’s voice. The nurse glared. Maggie tried to lower her voice, but it was still too loud for the ICU. It didn’t matter. “He’s gone,” she half-shouted. “The truck’s gone!”
Neal ran to the window, stopping only long enough to confirm what Maggie had said. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered under his breath. Then he nodded to the stairwell, and without another word, they were off.
Maggie radioed it in from the car, putting a description of the vehicle out on a band shared between local and state police. Once the word was out, Maggie tried to calm herself down, running through the possibilities in her head. “Okay,” she said. Her voice was thin and reedy with panic. It sounded like a stranger speaking with her mouth. “The locals are on it. If Kindler’s trying to hide in town, he better have already done it.”
Neal nodded. As he sped out of the parking lot, his eyes were locked on the road and his face was a taut mask of concentration, but his voice was calm. “Right,” he said. “Good.”
Maggie’s mind raced. “If he wants to make a run for it, he’ll probably panic and head to the interstate. He’ll have state troopers up his tailpipe in a second out there.”
“Right,” Neal said again. “Good.”
What were his other options? Maggie let her mind spin as she sorted them.
The realization hit her like a blow to the head.
“Oh, jeez, Neal,” she said. “He’s not ready to run yet.”
But Neal was apparently a step or two ahead of her, as he already had the cruiser
pointed straight back toward Burgettsville. “I know,” he said, his voice level and calming. “We’re on it.” As he gunned the engine, Maggie realized Neal was trying to calm himself as well. “We’re on it.”
They were just pulling into Burgettsville when the radio crackled to life with a call from dispatch. A 911 call had come in from Dressler Court. Seems a pickup truck had come tearing down the street, slid out on a patch of black ice and smashed up some good citizen’s mailbox. Said good citizen shouted at the driver from his porch, but the driver retreated across the street to a neighbor’s house, where he forced the door and disappeared inside.
It was, of course, exactly the call they had been expecting.
Kindler was going for his daughter.
Neal hit Dressler Court moments later, very nearly sliding out in the same patch of black ice Kindler had hit. The cruiser fishtailed to a sliding stop against the curb in front of Lucinda’s house. They leapt from the car to the sound of shouts emanating from the good citizen across the street, but they didn’t have time to stop now. Neal waved the neighbor back, and though the neighbor appeared for a moment to move toward them with another round of shouting, he was silenced instantly when Neal and Maggie drew their weapons and advanced on Lucinda’s porch.
The porch light was off, but Maggie could see from the interior light that spilled out into the night that the front door stood half open. The freezing wind whipped snow flurries off the porch and into the house. Maggie moved in cautiously at first, but when she heard a moan from inside and saw a human form sprawled in the front hall, her adrenaline kicked in, and she was carried forward on a current over which she had dangerously little control.
Inside, Maggie took stock of the situation. The body on the hallway floor was Jake’s. He was awake and moaning, but his face was a mask of pain, and he clutched his chest and gasped for breath. Behind him was the kitchen, and in the antiseptic while light therein, Maggie saw that the back door stood wide open.
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