Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1)

by Barbara Golder

  She shook her head again. No sense thinking about problems she could not solve. She hurried to the pew, speaking as she went.

  “I need the key to the house. It is my day to clean. You forgot to leave it open for me.”

  “So I did.”

  He dug in his pocket and brought out a fat ring of keys.

  “Just leave it on the table and leave the door unlocked if I am not back before you leave. I usually don’t lock it myself.”

  Isa shook her head. “I will bring it right back. It is not safe to leave a house unlocked.”

  A thief believes everyone steals, wasn’t that the saying? Isa wasn’t a thief, but too many in this town were. And most of them had good houses and plenty of money, and the people they robbed blamed it all on others, usually the maids or the workers, never their friends.

  “You are too trusting, Father.”

  Father Matt regarded Isa with respect.

  “I think you are right, Isa. I probably am. But it’s my job to trust, verdad?”

  Isa hesitated. She had no business advising a priest, that she knew, but something about the meeting she had interrupted troubled her.

  “That woman, Father. The one who was here, Marla, she is not a good woman. Cuidado, Padre, cuidado.”

  It was a measure of her distress that she broke two of her own rules. She spoke in Spanish, and she used the woman’s name. She made a quick sign of the cross as she remembered her grandmother’s admonition to her: don’t speak the name of the devil unless you are ready to do battle with him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  JUNE 13, MORNING

  I wondered what I had done to deserve the fact that Pete Wilson was sitting in my office. Weakness under pressure, I suspected. After all, what I needed to do was tell Tina to send him packing when she called announcing his presence in the building. Instead, I had granted him an audience, partly out of the hope of figuring out where he was getting his all-too-abundant information. Bad choice.

  It’s never a good idea to try to outfox a weasel, especially if you’re becoming something of a chicken. This string of murders had worn me down. That, added to the fact that there was a better-than-even chance that the leak really did come from my office, had put me uncharacteristically on the defensive. And Wilson was enough of a journalist that my usual trick of keeping quiet wouldn’t work. He made a living getting people to talk about things they didn’t want to talk about, and he was good at it. He surprised me, though, with his first question, which wasn’t about the murders at all.

  “So, did Marla Kincaid lose her baby?”

  I answered promptly and with an unusually clear conscience.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her.”

  “She’s out of the hospital. I saw her late yesterday afternoon, walking around.”

  I considered for a moment. First trimester bleeding is common, and about half the time, it signals a miscarriage. Marla Kincaid was showing some signs of stress when I saw her. I remembered her increased pulse rate. I knew from experience that chances of a miscarriage were pretty high, but it wasn’t experience I was willing to share with Wilson.

  “You got me,” I said as non-committally as I could, beating back the thought that, if she had miscarried, she belonged in bed to recover, and if she hadn’t, she belonged in bed to try to save the baby.

  Then again, Marla Kincaid didn’t strike me as too concerned with anything beyond her immediate desires, fame and attention being prime among them.

  “I suggest you ask her.”

  “AIDS can cause miscarriage, can’t it?”

  I could see myself being cited as a source in a largely fabricated article about Marla Kincaid. I punted, crossing my fingers so my outright lie didn’t count, given that I wasn’t going to confession these days.

  “I can’t really remember, Pete. You’ll just have to look it up.”

  In fact, AIDS would make no difference to the pregnancy, unless Marla Kincaid decided to abort her baby because of it.

  Wilson looked skeptical. One disadvantage of being—and being known as—good at my job is that it seriously limits plausible deniability in situations like this. Wilson knew I was skirting the truth, but it seemed that Marla Kincaid wasn’t the real reason for his visit.

  “Any progress in figuring out the murders? Links between the seven victims, other than being rich?”

  “Who told you there are seven victims? Tom Patterson says only two. And it’s his job to figure out connections, not mine.”

  I was hoping he’d take the bait and go pester the sheriff. I also knew that the sheriff probably wasn’t talking to him, which was the reason for his visit to me.

  No such luck.

  “Two murders with three gunshot deaths in town in the last week, not counting Mitch Houston. The sheriff is either dreaming or incompetent.”

  Now Wilson was baiting me.

  I shrugged. “Take it up with Tom yourself. Not my problem. I just do the autopsies.”

  “How often do you see sniper murders with a .22?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We have them now.”

  “Any idea who would have enough skill to pull off shots like that? Any ideas why there’s not a single good description of a suspect?”

  “No. And no.”

  “I hear there are at least two guns involved. If you count Houston, three.”

  Now I was annoyed. The ballistics report wasn’t public knowledge, and I was sure Tom Patterson hadn’t said anything. It was beginning to look like the leak really was in my shop. Either that or Wilson was bluffing.

  “Where do you hear that?”

  Wilson smiled. “Gotta protect my sources, Doc, you know that.”

  “Protect them all you want, but if I were you I would make sure they are reliable.”

  “Are you telling me there’s only one gun?” Wilson leaned forward.

  “I am not telling you anything.”

  “Then you aren’t denying it, either.”

  I could already visualize that article in tomorrow’s paper …a highly placed source at the Western Slope Forensic Center did not deny there are at least two guns involved…this was a no win situation. I changed the subject.

  “Ask me something I can talk about, Pete, or quit wasting my time.”

  Pete Wilson grinned, clearly enjoying himself.

  “Okay. Any idea why Marla Kincaid went to see that priest friend of yours yesterday?”

  My surprise must have shown on my face, because he moved in for the kill.

  “Third time this week according to my sources. He’s even been riding the gondola with her. Not exactly keeping a low profile. And he was dressed in civvies. Quite a change for the man who walks around town in a dress most of the time.”

  Father Matt was not likely to escape local attention under ordinary circumstances. Aside from his imposing appearance, he insisted in wearing full clerical garb all the time, even gadding about town in a cassock in the heat of the summer. Fr. Matt told the reporter that it was just the way he dressed, but confided to me over coffee once that he was taking a leaf from the saints. Dressing like Bing Crosby in Going My Way made it impossible for the locals to avoid recognizing that there was at least one committed Catholic in their midst. Like St. Francis, he called it “preaching without words,” and it was. Stares and comments followed him, at least among the visitors, and he was the subject of myriad, if brief, conversations. As he would say, it was a start. If he left it off, it was intentional. Under the circumstances, that worried me. This morning, Isa had looked up from her breakfast and told me in a quiet voice that she had seen a big man standing by the house the night of the Houston murder. Father Matt was a big, big man. I did not like the turn the conversation was taking.

  “None. Take it up with Father Matt. But I’d remind you there are all kinds of reasons, chief among them the fact that her boyfriend was just murdered.”

  “Nobody’s seen much evidence of grief.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him
that grief takes many forms, then stopped myself. “Whatever,” I said, channeling Ben.

  He must have read my mind about Ben.

  “She’s hanging out with your son, too. He’s up there every day, even brought her flowers.”

  It stopped me cold; in my business not much does. The room was filled with the silence I wanted, but it was working to Wilson’s advantage, not mine. He let it grow for a long minute, smiled his predator’s smile, stood and left. He had what he’d come for.

  **********

  Lucy Cho opened the specimen cooler in the lab and took the vials from amid the ice packs in the Styrofoam box. It was a set of specimens from one of the pathologists in the northern part of the state, needing extended drug screening toxicology that wasn’t available in his own area lab. It seemed a waste of time to fire up the analyzer for a few specimens, and even putting everything together, there just wasn’t that much that needed to be done. Most of it was blood alcohol testing that arrived regularly from the various law enforcement agencies; Dr. Wallace had somehow finagled the state into using the Center as the reference forensic laboratory for the western half of the state. Every once in a while, something more interesting, more exotic, but not today. Still, Dr. Wallace insisted that things be turned around promptly.

  “People don’t like to wait for the answers,” she told her when Lucy had pointed out the expense, the wasted reagents. “And they ought not have to. Justice delayed is justice denied. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Just do it.”

  Lucy brushed her black hair over her shoulder and consulted the clipboard to make certain what she had to do. Check and double check was the rule of the lab. It was in every place she’d worked, but Dr. Wallace took it to extremes. There wasn’t room for mistakes in her shop, even human ones, insignificant ones. Lucy remembered the time, when she had just arrived, that she had mixed up two blood typing reports, putting them in the wrong folder. Dr. Wallace had been at her desk before the end of the day,

  “Lucy, you messed these reports up. Look.”

  Dr. Wallace had laid the two folders out in front of her, open to the serology tab.

  Lucy had immediately seen the error and swapped the offending papers from one folder to another. Dr. Wallace wasn’t satisfied.

  “Do them again. These have to be right.”

  Lucy had been indignant. “I know the results are fine,” she had protested. “I just put them in the wrong folder. No big deal.”

  Dr. Wallace had been patient, but firm. “Maybe so. Do them again anyway.”

  She had stood by Lucy’s side while she re-ran the results, quiet, unobtrusive, but making Lucy nervous all the same. She had been relieved when the results panned out the same as they had before.

  “See. I told you.”

  Lucy had been annoyed at the waste of her time. If Dr. Wallace didn’t have confidence in her work, she might as well look for another job. It would be hard to find one that paid as well, she reflected, or was in as nice a place, or came with its own apartment, even if it was on the premises of the center.

  Lucy’s annoyance had rolled off Dr. Wallace. She had taken the new reports and re-read the file with satisfaction. Lucy fidgeted in anticipation. She had never worked for anyone as distant and complicated as this woman. Finally Dr. Wallace looked up from the folders and smiled, a rare occurrence.

  “Good job, and thanks. I know it seems silly to you, and I know you think I’m way too compulsive, but I have my reasons. There isn’t room for error in anything we do, Lucy. Lives depend on it, even though pretty much everyone we do work on is dead. Dead doesn't mean unimportant. I mean to see that we take every opportunity to make things right before they go out of the lab. You did a good job. Please humor me.”

  Dr. Wallace had flipped the folders closed and left Lucy to her work.

  Lucy never mixed reports again. She checked and double-checked her work and when she found an error, which wasn’t often, she checked them again. Dr. Wallace never came into the lab to complain again, and they even sometimes had the odd technical conversation about this test or that or another. Lucy was surprised that a pathologist knew so much about the daily workings of a forensic lab. Most of them left that to the hired help, able to interpret the results well enough, but a disaster if they ever had to actually run a test.

  Lucy knew Dr. Wallace could step in at the bench any time she needed to, and it impressed her. Her boss worked hard and long. She was here before Lucy came down in the morning, and there until well after she left, usually bent over her desk and piles of papers. She was fair to her staff, but she expected them to cover their shifts, even keeping the office open on Saturdays, and she expected hard work.

  She had worked for other pathologists like that, always busy, always puttering about in their offices. One of the professors she had worked with in training had an office cluttered with stacks of papers and books and specimen jars, with an old-fashioned barber chair covered in thinning red velvet in the middle of the room. The professor had liked to sit in it and review reports; he had called it his thinking chair. Those guys — they were mostly guys — were nutty and didn’t have much of a life, having run off their wives and divorced or never actually married in the first place. Forensic pathologists were an odd breed, she reflected, except for Dr. Wallace. She seemed sad but otherwise pretty normal.

  Today’s load was a total of ten specimens. Not much, but not bad, either. The analyzer beeped, signaling it was ready. Lucy pipetted the samples, loaded the tray and was just about to seat it when the lab door opened. It was Dr. Wallace. Lucy experienced a momentary frisson of anxiety. Had something gotten past her in error?

  “Looks like a light day.”

  Lucy relaxed a bit. This was a social visit.

  “Very. Ten samples, that’s all. And I have a little paperwork to catch up on.”

  “Finish those up and take the rest of the day off. It’s beautiful outside, and we need a break. I’m heading up to the house myself. I need to get out of here for a while, and you probably do too. Let’s take advantage of a lull. Just keep your cell on in case something comes up.”

  Dr. Wallace waved a hand, closed the door and was gone.

  Lucy shook her head. Just when she thought she understood her rigorous, taciturn boss, Dr. Wallace started showing enough signs of life just to be confusing. Ah well, a free afternoon — no sense arguing. She seated the tray and punched the start button.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  JUNE 13, AFTERNOON

  I had left the Center in sheer desperation. I had gone over and over the data Ben had pulled out, and I had to agree. There was a serial killer at work. For my nickel, that series included those accidents, but I couldn’t find a connection that pulled it all together other than being an heir to vast sums of money, and I had no idea where to start looking. A killer loose in town, one so clever as to avoid being seen in the middle of a crowd and such a good shot he could drop a man on the spot even with a varmint gun. All in all, a lousy day. Staying inside the Center ruminating on it made it just that much worse.

  After Wilson’s visit, I finally looked out my window at the clear blue sky and decided to call it quits. I walked home, opened the door, and went directly to the kitchen. I scrounged in the fridge for the makings of a sandwich — a late lunch — poured myself a glass of wine and went out onto the back deck. Isa and all the others so newly arrived were gone for the day, out on a picnic with one of the Hispanic liaisons from St. Pat’s. They’d taken a trip to Owl Creek Reservoir, and I didn’t expect them until after dark. It was one of those golden summer afternoons when the sunlight would last well into the evening.

  Three kids in residence overnight had turned the clock back to a time when my life was filled with noise and vitality. As much as I loved it, I was unused to the energy that children demand. I had to admit that a few moments of solitude watching the sun dapple the trees as I sat and simply did nothing had appeal, especially since I knew the whole tribe would be back again this evening, noi
sy as ever. What had I been thinking when I offered them a place to live?

  I needed to keep my mind away from the conundrum at the office that was driving me crazy. So I picked up the paperback I had been trying to finish for months, an entertaining bit of mind-candy involving murder on a culinary cruise and punctuated with recipes. I jokingly called this sort of escapism “reading professional journals,” but it was a nice change to see a murder committed, wrapped in mystery, cleanly solved and the bad guy punished within a few hundred pages.

  My life’s work didn’t usually turn out that way. Most of the time, the deaths I investigated were tragically ordinary, with no challenge to solve them, rather like the Houston case. Or, like the Houston case looked like at first. Now it was firmly wedged in the column of cases-I-can’t- solve, and it was making my head hurt.

  Aside from the headlines about a serial killer and the attacks on Tom’s office and mine, the morning paper had a short article and a half-page photograph of Marla Kincaid two pages in. She was supposedly still confined to bed, but now at her luxurious home under the virtual care of an international expert on high-risk pregnancy. She looked wan and pale, propped up in bed and surrounded by pillows. I wondered whether the picture had been taken before or after she visited Father Matt.

  The photo caught my eye because she kept surfacing at the edges of my world, reminding me of Houston’s death and John’s and the fact that all I ever did was pick up the pieces of murder. She had surprised me with her visit to my office. There was real pain in her voice when she asked about Houston, but something about it didn’t fit. I frowned at the recollection.

  This series of trustafarian deaths had me flummoxed, and there wasn’t anything useful I had been able to uncover to help out my law enforcement brethren. Waiting for the next shoe to drop was what drove me to improbable novels and the fruit of the vine on a workday afternoon, when, if my interior barometer were correct, the next shoe was indeed due to drop.