“What about Cassie?”
“Still drowsy. We’re working on getting her sugar stabilized. She should be okay soon.”
“What’s in store for her, procedure-wise?”
“More blood tests, a tomographic scan of her gut. It may be necessary, eventually, to open her up surgically—get an actual look at her pancreas. But that’s a ways off. Got to get back to Torgeson. He’s reviewing the chart in my office. Turned out to be a nice guy, really casual.”
“Is he reviewing Chad’s chart too?”
“I called for it but they couldn’t find it.”
“I know,” I said. “I was looking for it, too—for background. Someone named D. Kent Herbert pulled it—he worked for Ashmore.”
“Herbert?” she said. “Never heard of him. Why would Ashmore be wanting the chart when he wasn’t even interested the first time?”
“Good question.”
“I’ll put a tracer on it. Meantime, let’s concentrate on Ms. Cassie’s metabolic system.”
We headed for the stairs.
I said, “Would hypoglycemia explain the other problems—breathing difficulties, bloody stools?”
“Not directly, but all the problems could have been symptoms of a generalized infectious process or a rare syndrome. New stuff is always coming at us—every time an enzyme is discovered, we find someone who doesn’t have it. Or it could even be an atypical case of something we did test for that just didn’t register in her blood for some God-knows-why reason.”
She talked quickly, animatedly. Pleased to be dueling with familiar enemies.
“Do you still want me involved?” I said.
“Of course. Why do you ask?”
“Sounds like you’ve moved away from Munchausen and think it’s genuine.”
“Well,” she said, “it would be nice for it to be genuine. And treatable. But even if that is the case, we’re probably talking chronic disease. So they can use the support, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“Thanks much.”
Down the stairs. At the next floor I said, “Could Cindy—or anyone else—have somehow caused the hypoglycemia?”
“Sure, if she gave Cassie a middle-of-the-night shot of insulin. I thought of that right away. But that would have required a lot of expertise with timing and dosage.”
“Lots of practice injections?”
“Using Cassie as a pincushion. Which I can buy, theoretically. Cindy has plenty of time with Cassie. But given Cassie’s reaction to needles, if her mom was sticking her, wouldn’t she be freaking out every time she saw her? And I’m the only one she seems to despise.… Anyway, I never noticed any unusual injection marks when I did the physical.”
“Would they be obvious, given all the other sticks she’s had?”
“Not obvious, but I’m careful when I do my exams, Alex. The kids’ bods get gone over pretty thoroughly.”
“Could the insulin have been administered other than by injection?”
She shook her head as we continued to descend. “There are oral hypoglycemics, but their metabolites would show up on the tox panel.”
Thinking of Cindy’s health discharge from the army, I said, “Any diabetes in the family?”
“Someone sharing their insulin with Cassie?” She shook her head. “Back at the beginning, when we were looking at Cassie’s metabolics, we had both Chip and Cindy tested. Normal.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good luck pinning it down.”
She stopped and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. “I appreciate your comments, Alex. I’m so thrilled to be dealing with biochemistry, I run the risk of narrowing my perspective.”
Back on the first floor I asked a guard where to find the Personnel office. He looked me over and told me right here, on the first floor.
It turned out to be exactly where I remembered it. Two women sat at typewriters; a third filed papers. The filer came up to me. She was straw-haired and hatchet-faced, in her late fifties. Under her ID was a circular badge that looked homemade, bearing a photo of a big hairy sheepdog. I told her I wanted to send a condolence card to Dr. Laurence Ashmore’s widow and asked for his home address.
She said, “Oh, yes, isn’t it terrible? What’s this place coming to?” in a smoker’s voice, and consulted a folder the size of a small-town phone book. “Here you go, Doctor—North Whittier Drive, over in Beverly Hills.” She recited a street address in the 900’s.
North Beverly Hills—prime real estate. The 900 block placed it just above Sunset. Prime of the prime; Ashmore had lived on more than research grants.
The clerk sighed. “Poor man. Just goes to show you, you can’t buy your safety.”
I said, “Isn’t that the truth?”
“Isn’t it, though?”
We traded wise smiles.
“Nice dog,” I said, indicating the badge.
She beamed. “That’s my honey—my champ. I breed true Old English, for temperament and working ability.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It’s more than that. Animals give without expecting anything in return. We could learn a few things from them.”
I nodded. “One more thing. Dr. Ashmore had someone working with him—D. Kent Herbert? The medical staff would like him to be informed of the charity fund the hospital’s establishing in Dr. Ashmore’s honor but no one’s been able to locate him. I was appointed to get hold of him but I’m not even sure he’s still working here, so if you have some sort of an address, I’d be much obliged.”
“Herbert,” she said. “Hmm. So you think he terminated?”
“I don’t know. I think he was still on the payroll in January or February, if that helps.”
“It might. Herbert … let’s see.”
Walking to her desk, she pulled another thick folder from a wall shelf.
“Herbert, Herbert, Herbert … Well, I’ve got two here, but neither of them sound like yours. Herbert, Ronald, in Food Services, and Herbert, Dawn, in Toxicology.”
“Maybe it’s Dawn. Toxicology was Dr. Ashmore’s specialty.”
She screwed up her face. “Dawn’s a girl’s name. Thought you were trying to find a man.”
I gave a helpless shrug. “Probably a mixup—the doctor who gave me the name didn’t actually know this person, so both of us assumed it was a man. Sorry for the sexism.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “I don’t mess with all that stuff.”
“Does this Dawn have a middle initial ‘K’?”
She looked down. “Yes, she does.”
“Then, there you go,” I said. “The name I was given was D. Kent. What’s her job description?”
“Um, five thirty-three A—let me see …” Thumbing through another book. “That looks like a research assistant, Level One.”
“Did she transfer to another department in the hospital, by any chance?”
Consulting yet another volume, she said, “Nope. Looks like a termination.”
“Hmm … Do you have an address for her?”
“Nope, nothing. We throw out personal stuff thirty days after they’re gone—got a real space problem.”
“When exactly did she terminate?”
“That I can tell you.” She flipped a few pages and pointed to a code that I couldn’t comprehend. “Here we go. You’re right—about her being here in February. But that was her last month—she gave notice on the fifteenth, went officially off payroll on the twenty-eighth.”
“The fifteenth,” I said. The day after pulling Chad Jones’s chart.
“That’s right. See right here? Two slash fifteen?”
I stuck around for a few more minutes, listening to a story about her dogs. But I was thinking about two-legged creatures.
It was 3:45 when I drove out of the parking lot. A few feet from the exit a motorcycle cop was giving a jaywalking ticket to a nurse. The nurse looked furious; the cop’s face was a blank tablet.
Traffic on Sunset was obstructed by a four-ca
r fender-bender, and the accompanying turmoil wrought by rubberneckers and somnolent traffic officers. It took almost an hour to reach the inanimate green stretch that was Beverly Hills’s piece of the boulevard. Tile-roofed ego monuments perched atop hillocks of Bermuda grass and dichondra, embellished by hostile gates, tennis court sheeting, and the requisite battalions of German cars.
I passed the stadium-sized weed-choked lot that had once housed the Arden mansion. The weeds had turned to hay, and all the trees on the property were dead. The Mediterranean palace had served briefly as a twenty-year-old Arab sheik’s plaything before being torched by persons unknown—aesthetic sensibilities offended by puke-green paint and moronic statuary with blacked-in pubic hair, or just plain xenophobia. Whatever the reason for the arson, rumors had been circulating for years about subdivision and rebuilding. But the real estate slump had taken the luster off that kind of optimism.
A few blocks later the Beverly Hills Hotel came into view, ringed by a motorcade of white stretch limos. Someone getting married or promoting a new film.
As I approached Whittier Drive, I decided to keep going. But when the letters on the street sign achieved focus, I found myself making a sudden right turn and driving slowly up the jacaranda-lined street.
Laurence Ashmore’s house was at the end of the block, a three-story, limestone Georgian affair on a double lot at least two hundred feet wide. The building was blocky, and impeccably maintained. A brick circular drive scythed through a perfect flat lawn. The landscaping was spare but good, with a preference for azaleas, camellias, and Hawaiian tree ferns—Georgian goes tropical. A weeping olive tree shaded half the lawn. The other half was sun-kissed.
To the left of the house was a porte-cochere long enough to shelter one of the stretches I’d just seen at the hotel. Beyond the wooden gates were treetops and the flaming red clouds of bougainvillea.
Prime of the prime. Even with the slump, at least four million.
A single car was parked in the circular drive. White Olds Cutlass, five or six years old. A hundred yards in either direction the curb was vacant. No black-garbed callers or bouquets on the doorstop. Shuttered windows; no sign of occupancy. The placard of a security company was staked in the perfect, clipped grass.
I drove on, made a U-turn, passed the house again and continued home.
Routine calls from my service; nothing from Fort Jackson. I called the base anyway and asked for Captain Katz. He came on quickly.
I reminded him who I was and told him I hoped I hadn’t interrupted his dinner.
He said, “No, that’s fine, I was going to call you. Think I found what you’re after.”
“Great.”
“One second—here it is. Influenza and pneumonia epidemics over the last ten years, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, far as I can tell, we only had one major flu epidemic—one of the Thai strains—back in ’73. Which is before your time.”
“Nothing since?”
“Doesn’t look like it. And no pneumonia, period. I mean, I’m sure we’ve had plenty of isolated flu cases, but nothing that would qualify as an epidemic. And we’re real good about keeping those kinds of records. Only thing we usually have to worry about, in terms of contagion, is bacterial meningitis. You know how tough that can be in a closed environment.”
“Sure,” I said. “Have you had epidemics of meningitis?”
“A few. The most recent was two years ago. Before that, ’83, then ’78 and ’75—almost looks cyclical, come to think of it. Might be worth checking that out, see if someone can come up with a pattern.”
“How serious were the outbreaks?”
“Only one I observed personally was two years ago, and that was serious enough—soldiers died.”
“What about sequellae—brain damage, seizure disorders?”
“Most probably. I don’t have the data handy but I can get hold of them. Thinking of changing your research protocol?”
“Not quite yet,” I said. “Just curious.”
“Well,” he said, “that can be a good thing, curiosity. At least out in the civilian world.”
Stephanie had her hard data, and now I had mine.
Cindy had lied about her discharge.
Maybe Laurence Ashmore found some data too. Saw Cassie’s name on the admission and discharge sheets and got curious.
What else could have caused him to take another look at Chad Jones’s chart?
He’d never be able to tell me, but maybe his former assistant could.
I called 213, 310, and 818 Informations for a listing on Dawn Kent Herbert and got nowhere. Expanded my search to 805, 714, and 619 with the same result, then phoned Milo at Parker Center. He picked up and said, “Heard about your homicide last night.”
“I was at the hospital when it happened.” I told him about being questioned, the scene in the lobby. Feeling as if I’d been watched when I left the parking structure.
“Be careful, bucko. I got your message on Bottomley’s hubby, but I’ve got no domestic violence calls to her address and there’s no one on NCIC who could be her hubby. But she does have a troublemaker living there. Reginald Douglas Bottomley, D.O.B. ’70. Which would probably make him her son or maybe an errant nephew.”
“What’d he do to get in trouble?”
“Lots—he’s got a sheet long enough to cover Abdul-Jabbar’s bed. Sealed juvenile file, then a bunch of DUIs, possession, shoplifting, petty theft, burglary, robbery, assault. Lots of busts, a few convictions, a teensy bit of jail time, mostly at County. Got a call in to a detective over at Foothill Division, see what he knows. What’s the relevance of Bottomley’s home situation to the little kid?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “Just looking for stress factors that might get her to act out. Probably because she was getting on my nerves. ’Course, if Reggie turned out bad because Vicki abused him, that would tell us something. Meanwhile, I’ve got something that definitely is relevant. Cindy Jones lied about her military discharge. I just talked to Fort Jackson and there was no pneumonia epidemic in ’83.”
“That so?”
“She might have had pneumonia, but it wasn’t part of any outbreak. And she made a point about the epidemic.”
“Seems a stupid thing to lie about.”
“The Munchausen game,” I said. “Or maybe she was covering up something. Remember I told you the discharge seemed a sensitive topic for her—how she blushed and yanked her braid? The public health officer at the army base said there was an epidemic in ’83—just about the time Cindy would have been in. But it was bacterial meningitis. Which can lead to seizures. Giving us a link to another organ system Cassie’s had problems with. In fact, she had a grand mal seizure last night. In the hospital.”
“That’s a first.”
“Yup. First time anyone but Cindy saw it.”
“Who else did?”
“Bottomley and the ward clerk. And what’s interesting is, yesterday Cindy was talking to me about how Cassie always gets sick at home, then recovers right away in the hospital. So people start thinking her mother’s crazy. And here we are, a few hours later, with eyewitnesses and chemical corroboration. The lab tests turned up hypoglycemia, and now Stephanie’s convinced Cassie’s really sick. But hypoglycemia can be faked, Milo, by anything that alters the blood sugar, like a shot of insulin. I mentioned that to Stephanie, but I’m not sure she’s hearing it. She’s really geared up, looking for rare metabolic diseases.”
“Pretty sharp about-face,” he said.
“I can’t say that I blame her. After months of dealing with this, she’s frustrated and wants to practice medicine, not play psychological guessing games.”
“You, on the other hand …”
“I’ve got an evil mind—too much time hanging around you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, I can see your point about the meningitis, if that’s what the mom had. Seizures for all—like mother, like daughter. But you don’t know that yet. And if she w
as covering up, why would she bring up the discharge in the first place? Why even tell you she was in the army?”
“Why’d your confessor make up his story? If she’s a Munchausen, she’d get off on teasing me with half-truths. It would sure be nice to get hold of her discharge papers, Milo. Find out exactly what did happen to her in South Carolina.”
“I can try, but it’ll take time.”
“Something else. I went looking for Chad Jones’s post-mortem chart today but it was missing. Pulled by Ashmore’s research assistant in February and never returned.”
“Ashmore? The one who was killed?”
“The very same. He was a toxicologist. Stephanie had already asked him to review the chart half a year ago, when she started getting suspicious about Cassie. He did it reluctantly—pure researcher, didn’t work with patients. And he told her he’d found nothing. So why would he pull the chart again, unless he discovered something new about Cassie?”
“If he didn’t work with patients, how would he know about Cassie in the first place?”
“By seeing her name on the A and D’s—the admission and discharge sheets. They come out daily and every doctor gets them. Seeing Cassie on them time after time might have finally gotten him curious enough to review her brother’s death. The assistant’s a woman by the name of Dawn Herbert. I tried to get hold of her but she quit the hospital the day after she pulled the chart—talk about more cute timing. And now Ashmore’s dead. I don’t want to sound like some kind of conspiracy nut, but it’s weird, isn’t it? Herbert might be able to clear things up, but there’s no address or phone number listed for her from Santa Barbara down to San Diego.”
“Dawn Herbert,” he said. “As in the other Hoover.”
“Middle name of Kent. As in Duke of.”
“Fine. I’ll try to squeeze in a trace before I go off shift.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Show it by feeding me. Got any decent grub in the house?”
“I suppose—”
“Better yet, haute cuisine. I’ll pick. Gluttonous, overpriced, and on your credit card.”
He showed up at eight, holding out a white box. On the cover was a cartoon of a grinning, grass-skirted islander finger-spinning a huge disc of dough.
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