Murder, She Wrote--Murder in Red

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Nor do I. But I think it went beyond that, Seth. Isn’t there a condition where people become obsessed with their appearance?”

  “Well, there’s body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD. Just about everybody has something they don’t particularly like about the way they look, some minor flaw or imperfection. But people suffering from BDD are obsessed with those flaws and imperfections to the point where they become hostage to them. And the symptoms are normally worsened by age since their perceived flaws become harder to disguise and tend to be exacerbated by the normal aging process. They can’t control their negative thoughts and don’t believe it when people tell them they look fine. Their thoughts can result in severe emotional distress and interfere with their daily functioning. They might miss school or work, try to avoid as many social situations as possible, and isolate themselves, even from family and friends, because they are worried other people will notice their flaws.”

  “So someone suffering from BDD might go to extreme lengths to do whatever it takes not to grow older, or at least not appear older.”

  Seth flashed me that look of his. “Are we still talking about Mimi Van Dorn?”

  “Just in general.”

  “I’d say they’d go to lengths comparable to someone addicted to drugs.”

  “Desperate measures, in other words, that become more desperate with age.”

  “No one’s found the fountain of youth yet, and I doubt anyone will soon.” Seth’s expression flirted with a smile. “I’m starting to wonder if we’re talking about you, Jess. Get a look at one of your old jacket photos?”

  “I’ve been using the same one for twenty years.”

  “Maybe you’re jealous of J. B. Fletcher, then, since she never ages. Good thing, because the answer to your question is yes. Aging can either trigger body dysmorphic disorder or exacerbate it.”

  “Ever notice any of the symptoms with Mimi?”

  “You mean, before she fired me? Never thought about it much, but now that you mention it, she’d started asking me what I thought about some of those new antiaging concoctions and treatments. Hmmmmm . . .”

  I watched him start to stroke his chin, seeming to scratch at his small cleft.

  “What is it, Seth?”

  “Something I was going to tell Mort, about Mimi Van Dorn’s tox screen. There was something in her blood that routine analysis couldn’t identify. I’ve forwarded the sample on for a more detailed study.”

  “No idea what it might be?”

  “None.” He checked his watch, suddenly looking impatient with Mort’s failure to arrive. “What time do you have, Jess?”

  I checked my phone, even though a glance at my watch would’ve been faster. “Three twenty-two,” I told him, eyeing the big white numbers displaying the day and date beneath them.

  Seth adjusted his watch. “Five minutes slow. Think I’ll set it five minutes ahead to compensate.”

  And that’s when I realized something, something I’d missed before.

  “What’s wrong?” Seth asked me.

  I realized I’d risen from my chair, my mind somewhere else entirely. I was picturing my visit with Mort to watch the security tapes for the hour preceding Mimi Van Dorn’s death, from the point the night nurse last made her rounds to the time the alarm went off when she stopped breathing.

  “We need to go, Seth,” I heard myself say, as if it were someone else’s voice.

  “We?”

  “Cabot Cove Hospital. You’re driving. And we need to find Mort.”

  “Well,” I heard his voice chime behind me, “here he is.”

  “Just in time,” I said, swinging toward him.

  “In time for what?” he asked, eyeing Mara’s pastry racks forlornly, since he’d already figured out he wouldn’t be sampling today’s special.

  “To see what we missed this morning,” I told him.

  Chapter Eleven

  “There it is!” I said. “Freeze it right there!”

  The uniformed guard familiar with the workings of the Cabot Cove Hospital security system froze the screen on the same shot of the nurses’ station Mort and I had glimpsed that morning.

  Mort moved closer to the screen, squinting. “What am I missing here, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “I remember when you used to call me that all the time.”

  “Like you used to call me Sheriff. That would be, what, maybe a hundred murders ago? You might say it was homicide that brought us to a first-name basis.”

  “Look at the screen, Mort.”

  He squinted again. “I’m still not seeing whatever it is I’m supposed to be, Jessica.”

  “The digital clock over the nurses’ station.”

  “What about it?”

  “Notice the time?”

  “Four fifty-five. Forty minutes before Mimi Van Dorn coded.”

  “And the date?”

  “Monday—” That was as far as he got. “But today . . .”

  “Is Tuesday,” I completed for him.

  “Well, I’ll be . . .” Mort was squinting toward the screen again, as if to confirm what he already knew to be the truth. “How did I miss this?”

  “You mean, how did we miss this? The way all clues are missed: We weren’t looking. And because if you keep watching, the date goes back to today’s sometime before the code was called.”

  “But after whoever killed Mimi Van Dorn snuck into her room.”

  “Wait a minute,” interjected the security guard. “Are the two of you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “The tapes,” I started.

  “Somebody switched them,” Mort picked up.

  “Made Tuesday look like Monday,” I followed. “Which kept us from seeing whoever murdered Mimi Van Dorn.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “How hard would that be?” Mort asked the guard, whose name was Frank, an easy one for me to remember.

  “Pretty easy for anyone who knows their way around a system like this,” Frank told him. “Simple matter of copying the loop in the same time period from yesterday and subbing it in on today’s.”

  “Almost like cutting and pasting into a document,” I said.

  “I suppose.”

  “Is the original still there?” Mort wondered. “Any way we can retrieve it?”

  Frank shook his head, expression stretched into a grim frown. “Like the lady said, cutting and pasting. Once you do that, it’s gone.”

  “And who could have done it?” I chimed in. “Who could have accessed this room and made the switch?”

  “Pretty much anyone with a hospital key card, ma’am. Even this early in the morning, that’s a whole lot of folks.”

  “Even more when you consider whoever did it wasn’t necessarily on duty at the time,” I noted, which meant the work logs might go only so far in helping us.

  “What about the password required to log in to the system?” Mort said. “It had to be somebody who knew the password. That might serve our cause, right?”

  Frank frowned again as he lifted up the desk blotter on which the computer rested. Beneath it was a strip of tape on which a sequence of letters had been scrawled in big, bold print: CCHSECURITY.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Well, I’ll be,” Mort said, back in the hallway.

  “You said that already.”

  “I did?”

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one around here whose memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Well, Mrs. Fletcher, we know one thing almost for sure now, don’t we?”

  I nodded. “Mimi Van Dorn was, in fact, murdered.”

  “Which reminds me,” Mort said sternly, holding out his hand, “I think there’s something you forgot to give me.”

  I remembered I still had Mimi’s phone in
my bag, fished it out, and handed it over.

  “Then I think I’ll put this where it belongs,” Mort said, dropping Mimi Van Dorn’s cell phone into an evidence bag. “You know the penalty for tampering with evidence?”

  “I wasn’t tampering.”

  “No? What would you call it, then?”

  “Following up on a lead.”

  “You conveniently forget to mention that?”

  “I didn’t know it would go anywhere.”

  “Then, Mrs. Fletcher, why don’t you tell me where it ended up going?”

  “Mrs. Fletcher again? Really, Mort?”

  “Takes me back to the time years ago when you used to respect the law.”

  “Your memory must be even worse than mine. I’ve always respected the law.”

  “Is that what you call removing potential evidence from a crime scene?”

  “We didn’t know it was a crime scene at the time, Sheriff.”

  “You did, just like you always do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come back for the phone. Now, where did whatever was on it take you?”

  I told Mort about Mimi’s heated phone call the day before as she was crossing the street. How she’d received a call from a blocked number. George Sutherland’s fancy Scotland Yard app revealed the actual number for me, which turned out to belong to Mimi’s son, Tripp.

  “It’s not so fancy, Jessica,” Mort chided, waving his phone at me. “I’ve got one, too. And what did you learn from Tripp Van Dorn?”

  I told him about our meeting earlier in the day at Good Shepherd Manor, where the young man was on the verge of getting kicked out for nonpayment, and the grudge he bore for his mother after she broke the trust responsible for providing his long-term care. How he’d attempted to hire Cabot Cove lawyer Fred Cooper, only to be rebuffed.

  “I’ve met Fred a couple times,” Mort noted. “Didn’t impress me very much.”

  “To afford a Main Street rent, he must be impressing someone.”

  “Real estate closings in all probability, just like he told you. A lawyer can make a killing with all these new homes and condos in the area.”

  I cleared my throat. “No pun intended, of course.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Only two nurses had staffed the intensive care unit desk the night before. The chief ICU nurse, Amy Billings, was working a split schedule and had fortuitously just returned to her station when Mort and I approached.

  “Nurse Billings,” Mort said, his uniform providing any introduction that was necessary, “I was hoping I could steal another moment of your time.”

  “Of course, Sheriff,” Billings responded, seeming not at all put off by Mort’s request. “Have you made any progress looking into Ms. Van Dorn’s death, poor woman?”

  “Some, including the fact that the security tapes from around the time of her death were altered.”

  “Altered?”

  “The footage from this morning was actually from yesterday, according to the time stamp.”

  “How odd.”

  “That was our thought, too, ma’am.”

  Hearing the word “our” led Nurse Billings to acknowledge me. “Oh, Mrs. Fletcher, forgive me. I didn’t notice you standing there. So nice to finally meet you. Are you here in an official capacity?” she asked.

  “Unofficially,” I said, returning her slight smile. “Ms. Van Dorn and I were friends.”

  “I recall that from this morning.”

  I nodded, aware now how little I truly knew about Mimi. Can you really be friends, at least close friends, with anyone it turns out you know so little about? Mimi knew no more about me than I knew about her. We had shared moments, not memories or the minutiae of our pasts, with each other. That might have made for a different type of friend, but a friend all the same. The world has a way of changing things up on you.

  “I’d like to go over the same period in time in a bit more detail, if you don’t mind,” Mort said to Nurse Billings.

  “Not at all, Sheriff.”

  Billings moved to a quieter section of the counter, away from the comings and goings of three other ICU nurses who were currently on duty.

  “But,” she continued, “you should know that old security system isn’t the most reliable. We encountered a similar problem when we were looking into some missing inventory from the hospital supply closets, and in that case entire blocks of time, even whole days, were missing when we tried to review the footage.”

  Mort nodded, accepting her disclaimer. “Getting back to the approximate time we believe Ms. Van Dorn died, you and another nurse were on duty. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, a third, Wilma Lodge, had called in sick, but we didn’t bother fielding a replacement because we only had six patients to tend to.”

  “Checks every hour, I believe. Would that be correct?”

  “At minimum.”

  Mort jotted down a note in that magical memo pad of his that never seemed to run out of pages. “And the last time you checked on Ms. Van Dorn would have been . . .”

  Nurse Billings sidestepped to check the actual logs. “Four forty-five a.m.”

  “And she coded at . . .”

  Another check of the log. “Five thirty-five.”

  “So Ms. Van Dorn was unattended for fifty minutes.”

  “Well, Sheriff, I wouldn’t go so far as to say unattended.”

  “Figure of speech, ma’am.”

  “Then the answer’s yes.”

  I slid a bit closer to the counter. “Nurse Billings, you said the alarm in Ms. Van Dorn’s room went off at five thirty-five, signaling she had coded. How long would it take that to happen from the time her ventilator was unplugged?”

  “Certainly no more than two minutes.”

  Mort squeezed me out of the way a bit. “Do you remember anything, anything at all, that stands out from right around that time?”

  Nurse Billings shook her head slowly. “Like I told you this morning, Sheriff, no, nothing. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for. Were you alone at this counter when the alarm sounded?”

  “Yes, I remember that distinctly, because Nurse Willow was making her rounds at the time. She joined me in Ms. Van Dorn’s room just after the crash cart arrived.”

  “And you recall nothing that indicated the presence of someone else about on this hall in that same period?”

  Billings shook her head. “No one at all. Just Nurse Willow.”

  “We’ll be wanting to speak to her as well,” Mort noted.

  “She’s due in for a shift in about an hour. I could give her a call and ask her to come in a bit early to talk to you.”

  “That would be much appreciated, ma’am.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We were waiting in the lobby for Jane Willow when she arrived thirty minutes later, toting a thermos still riding the smell of hot coffee. We claimed a small nesting of chairs around a solid rectangular table littered with old magazines.

  “Thank you for seeing us,” Mort said to her. “We’ll keep this as short as possible.”

  “Yes, well, I’m just glad to be coming back in. After what happened this morning, the last place I wanted to be was home alone.”

  “I can understand that,” I interjected.

  “Nurse Willow,” Mort resumed, “according to Nurse Billings’s recollection, you were performing your rounds when Ms. Van Dorn coded. Is that correct?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And during those rounds, did you see or hear anything that stands out, perhaps indicating someone else was on the ward?”

  “Did you check the security camera footage?”

  “Unfortunately, it was malfunctioning at the time.”

  “It seems to act up on those occasions we actually need to refer to
it.”

  “Getting back to this morning,” Mort prompted.

  “I can’t recall anything out of the ordinary. I was in another patient’s room when I heard the code and came running.” She stopped, seeming to think for a moment. “There was one thing, but it happened earlier, at least an hour prior to the code, while Amy was on her break.”

  “Amy?” Mort asked.

  “I’m sorry, Nurse Billings. I was at the desk when the doctor from that clinic appeared.”

  I jumped in before Mort could. “Charles Clifton?”

  “Yes. He demanded to see Ms. Van Dorn and was quite insistent. I told him since he wasn’t on staff, I couldn’t allow it unless he’d been cleared, relented only when he insisted he was Ms. Van Dorn’s doctor.”

  “Did you accompany him to her room, Nurse Willow?”

  “No, Ms. Fletcher. I couldn’t leave the desk unattended. But I made sure to check on her as soon as he left.”

  I leaned a bit closer. “And this would have been after Dr. Clifton departed.”

  “Oh, definitely.”

  “Nurse Willow,” I started, “you said you checked on Ms. Van Dorn after Dr. Clifton had been in to see her and that she was fine, undisturbed, nothing awry.”

  “Yes. I’m certain of that.”

  “What about her room?”

  “Her room?”

  “Anything strike you as strange or out of place, different from when you’d last been inside it?”

  “Well, I closed the closet door because someone had left it open, but that doesn’t mean it was Dr. Clifton.”

  I looked toward Mort. “I suppose we’ll have to ask him, won’t we?”

  Chapter Twelve

  It had been a whirlwind day, one of those that felt more like a week. Given my lack of sleep and all that had transpired since I’d gotten word of Mimi’s death, I knew I was running on fumes but wasn’t about to put off a visit to Charles Clifton at the clinic that bore his name.

  “Is that really who you want to see there?” Mort asked, after we’d set out from the hospital in his sheriff’s department SUV.