With a slight elevation in her eyebrows Casey explained, “The bladder complaint was a ruse to get her urologist friend down here to be with her. Pretty resourceful, I think, shows us she’s thinking. So—I want to make sure I understand you correctly—she’ll be in the hospital for five days?”
“Actually no, the treatment is usually done on an outpatient basis. She goes in, gets the IV, is monitored for a while, and goes home.”
Almost to herself, Casey murmured, “I think I’ll ask her doctor friend to keep her here. I don’t want her at the jail.”
Cozy seemed to be coming out of the residual stupor that had been caused by being awakened from too short a nap in the middle of the night. His beard growth was especially heavy on his chin and left his face looking unwashed.
He asked, “Did my ex-wife discover anything while walking through that blizzard?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, she did. The witness Sam pointed her to thinks she saw someone fire a gun, so we know approximately where Lauren was standing when whatever happened happened. It’s a good fifty feet from where they found the guy in the street.”
“How reliable is the witness?”
“The good news is that she’s a pillar of the community. The bad news is she smokes enough dope to supply a reggae festival in Kingston.”
“That is a mixed bag.”
“Same witness also shot some videotape right after she heard the gunshot. The woman swears it shows a vehicle driving down the middle of the street, stopping, backing up, going forward, backing up, and driving away. Erin says that when she watched it she thought it looked like a videotape of a snowstorm—and maybe, just maybe, some headlights snaking around in the distance. She thinks a pro, a video wizard, might be able to make something of it.”
“Do we have the tape?”
“No, the lady wouldn’t part with it. Erin is going to go back in the morning with her own VCR and a fresh tape and make a copy.”
“Knowing Erin, she probably wants another contact high, too,” added Cozy, wistfully.
Scott Malloy hung up the phone in the corridor outside Lauren’s room and turned to Purdy.
“Somebody’s after Lauren, Scott.”
“Obviously. But why didn’t whoever it is kill her when they had the chance? That’s what I want to know.”
“Too risky? Or she knows something and they need to know what it is.”
“What? What does she know?”
“If someone is after her now, maybe they were after her before, too, when she fired the gun. Is she claiming self-defense?”
“She’s not claiming shit, Sam. She told us earlier she was firing at some streetlight, like a damn delinquent. She’s not telling us who might have been after her before. She’s not telling us who it was who took her just now. She’s not telling us what the guy wanted. Sam, we have to talk with her about what just happened. Where are her goddamn lawyers? This is nuts. I swear, between her lawyers and her doctors I could end up killing somebody myself tonight. Am I being punished for something or what?”
An ambulance attendant named Ted Hopper stomped snow off his boots and plodded into the ER carrying a filthy, water-soaked parka. He saw the detectives huddled in the otherwise deserted hallway. Hopper was a veteran of the streets and had been around enough accident scenes to know cops when he saw them.
“Either of you Purdy?”
“Yeah, what do you want?” Sam said, without bothering to turn his head.
“Sam, take a look,” said Malloy. “He’s bearing gifts.”
Hopper said, “My boss says you were asking about clothing from the shooting victim we picked up earlier tonight. Turned out someone had thrown this jacket behind the seat in the cab of the ambulance. I don’t know how or why it ended up there, but here it is if you still want it. It’s a mess.”
Purdy stared at the garment with great interest. The jacket was an expensive Gore-Tex model, but it had suffered a bad night. It was oily in places, wet in more places, and was coated with the telltale shimmer of blood.
“You’re sure it’s his?”
“Yeah, my partner says she cut it off the guy to get an IV started. His pressure was zilch when we got there; he needed fluids bad. I was driving the bus. Did the guy make it?”
“So far,” said Malloy.
“Good,” the man said, sounding as though he meant it.
“Hold on there one second,” Purdy said, as he hopped across the corridor to a red crash cart. On top was a box of latex examination gloves. He pulled a pair of gloves onto his hands and took the coat from the attendant, hanging it from its collar on his right index finger.
“Scott, do you mind getting his particulars? I want to take a closer look at this.” Malloy fished in his pocket for a pad and pen and started asking Hopper for details.
Two doors down from Lauren’s room Purdy found an examination table with an attached roll of white paper. He stretched out a double layer and gingerly pulled the jacket into some semblance of shape. He played with the light switches in the room until the big examination light above the table clicked on.
Thirty seconds later, he called out, “Scott, come in here. Look at this.”
“No, you come back here. I don’t want to leave the door unprotected again.” Malloy had developed an unshakable paranoia about leaving Lauren unguarded.
“I have to show you something.”
“It can wait. Come here and tell me.”
With his discovery, Purdy had enjoyed a brief adrenaline rush that subsided with the same speed with which it had arrived. He became aware of beads of sweat on his brow and realized he was cooking. As he walked back to join Malloy, he began to shed his coat.
“What? What’s so important with the jacket?”
“Burn marks on the fabric. Muzzle flash burns around the entry hole in the nylon.”
“Bullshit.”
“You go look for yourself, I’ll stay here. Second door.”
Malloy took off with long strides.
“Scott,” Purdy called. Malloy stopped and faced him. “Get some gloves on, okay? We’re all tired here.”
Malloy’s pace was much more deliberate when he returned a minute later. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure doesn’t. But you agree?”
“Yes, I agree, they look like flash burns. I even think there’s some burned gunpowder particles embedded in the nylon. It means she’s been lying to us.”
“Lying about what? She hasn’t told you squat.”
“Sam, she was no more than two feet from him when that gun went off.”
“Closer, twelve inches.”
“Whatever. We have a victim shot in the back from close range. Sounds like a goddamn execution to me. She’s not helping us here.”
“Then again, Scott, the woman can’t see, can she? How reliable a witness is she?”
“Are you saying she shot somebody at point-blank range and doesn’t even know it?”
“I don’t know what happened. Maybe the doctor who operated on him knows something. Is Tartabull still upstairs?”
Before Malloy could answer, two female uniforms marched into the ER. Malloy briefed them and stationed one at each entrance to the exam room. He tried to place one inside the room but as soon as she knocked and entered Adrienne barked at her in no uncertain terms to get out. Malloy didn’t want a fight with the doctors and told the officer to keep a post right outside the door.
While Malloy was getting the guards situated, Purdy retrieved evidence bags from his car. He secured the jacket in one, and the paper it was lying on in another and returned both bags to the trunk of his car.
Purdy and Malloy walked together upstairs to try to find the surgeon who had operated on the gunshot victim. They had a lot of questions for him.
Malloy and Purdy walked up behind Detective Danny Tartabull just in time to hear the doctor’s frustrated pronouncement.
“I don’t know what your brother-in-law’s operation was. All I can tell you is that, un
like your brother-in-law, this patient is not one of those patients who wakes up chatting in the recovery room, Detective. How many different ways must I explain that to you?”
Scott Malloy held out his hand and said, “I’m Malloy, Detective Malloy, you’re Doctor…?”
“Hassan.” He sighed.
“Detective Sam Purdy.”
“Hello, Detective. For what it’s worth, you can’t see him, either. One of you can’t see him. Three of you can’t see him. If ten of you show up, ten of you can’t see him. He’s not awake. His condition is critical. When he’s awake and lucid and stable, you may see him. My brother’s a cop in San Francisco; I know how it works. I’m not going to make this difficult.” The surgeon looked much fresher than the detectives. But everyone’s nerves were frayed.
“Can I ask a few questions, Doctor?”
“Certainly. If I can ask you one first. Who is he? I need some medical history.”
“We’re working on it.”
“You don’t know?”
“We don’t know. May I ask my questions now?”
“Yes.”
“Entry wound?”
“One, in his back. Above the pelvic bone, lower left quadrant.”
“Exit?”
“Yes. Two to three inches lower, two to three inches closer to mid-line than the entry.”
“No doubt about exit?”
“None, the slug’s not in him.”
“Was he run over by a vehicle?”
“It appears possible. Broken femur, broken ankle, crushed bones in his hand, other contusions and abrasions consistent with compression. Some internal hemorrhage not associated with the gunshot. Yes, I’d say it’s consistent with being run over by a car. Wouldn’t testify to it right now, but it’s consistent.”
Purdy asked, “Notice any burn marks around the wound? Like from a close-in shot?”
“No. The skin around the entry was free of burns, but he was outside, I assume wearing heavy clothing. The edges of the wound were cauterized, of course, by the slug. That’s to be expected.”
“You know what to look for?”
“I was a volunteer in Sarajevo for nine months, Detective. I know more about what gunshots do to flesh than I ever wanted to know.”
Malloy held out a business card. “Detective Tartabull will be here the rest of the night. Someone will take his place in the morning. If anything comes up about your patient’s condition, day or night, give me a call, please.”
“No problem.” Dr. Hassan pocketed the card without glancing at it.
The two detectives walked away.
Purdy said, “You really don’t know who the hell the victim is, yet?”
“No. No ID. Car at the scene that you guys found that we can’t place is registered to a business in the Springs. We’re trying to raise the owner of the business. No luck so far.”
“We have a photograph yet? Something to distribute to the papers?”
“Yeah, but Tartabull had to take it himself in the ER. We couldn’t get a police photographer over here before John Doe went into surgery. The film’s being developed. I hope Tartabull handles a camera better than he handles an interview. This storm is screwing everything up for everybody.”
“Not for the bad guys. We need some luck.”
Malloy scoffed. “This could end up being my first homicide, Sam, and what the hell do I have so far?”
An empty elevator arrived, the doors opened, and the men stepped in.
“I have a victim I can’t identify lying underneath a blanket of snow in the middle of a rich man’s block. I have an anonymous 911 call. I have no witnesses. I have evidence that somebody might have driven over my victim in a vehicle and then did it over again for good measure. I have a victim with a bullet in the back that forensics is going to tell me was fired at close range. And my best suspect is a lady DA I really like who is losing her vision for unknown reasons. She insists she fired her weapon from half a block away. And she has two goddamn lawyers who are driving me crazy. All my goddamn evidence is going to melt and drain away when the sun comes out tomorrow. Somebody seems to want to kidnap my suspect, and I’m so tired I could piss zzzzz’s if I could take the time to find a toilet.”
Sam waited a beat. Nobody had told Malloy yet. He couldn’t quite believe it.
“You’re leaving something out, Scott. You have another complication, too. A doozy.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Emma Spire.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean?”
“I think it means Court TV for you, big boy.”
The elevator deposited them on the first floor. Malloy yanked Purdy by the arm into a waiting area full of empty chairs.
“Don’t mess with me, Sam, what does Miss America have to do with this?”
“That house at the end of the block? On the rise? That’s her house.”
“So?” Malloy’s question was much more nonchalant than his tone.
“She’s a friend of Lauren’s. Works with her in the DA’s office.”
“I thought she came to town to be a law student, leave the spotlight behind.”
“She’s doing an internship, an outplacement.”
“How do you know she lives there, in that house?”
“When she started with the DA’s office, she did a couple of ridealongs with me. I took her home once. Sweet kid.”
“Did you talk to her tonight?”
“No. There was no answer. House was dark. No car in the garage. But I think the car in her driveway might belong to Lauren.”
“Can we get a warrant?”
“On the house or the car?”
“What do you mean?”
“See, that’s the problem. We don’t have plain view. The car’s parked at the top of the driveway in a little cutout behind some trees. It’s buried in snow. Can’t even be sure it’s Lauren’s until we clean it off. It’s complicated, is what Skiles says. Even more complicated in that we’d be giving a skeptical judge skimpy grounds to grant a warrant to search a celebrity’s property. Judge won’t be happy with that.”
“Don’t tell me—Skiles is thinking about all this, right?”
“You got it. My guess is he’ll be done thinking when the snow’s done melting.”
“What’s Emma Spire doing living in a big house in a ritzy neighborhood like that?”
“It was her grandparents’ house. After her parents died, she moved in. Lauren told me once that Emma felt she needed to feel the proximity to her family.”
“But she lives by herself?”
“That’s my understanding.”
“You don’t know what this shooting might have to do with her?”
“No. But I bet it has something to do with the reason Lauren’s not talking.”
“We need to find her, then. Emma Spire.”
“Yep.”
“Do we know where to look?”
“Nope.” Sam smiled. “We know some of her friends though. Maybe we can get them to cooperate.”
“Funny, Sam.”
Purdy placed a hand on the shoulder of his younger colleague and said, “They’re not all like this, Scott, trust me. Some of them aren’t this annoying. Some of them just pull your guts out a couple of inches at a time and put them in a blender and grind them up. Some of them rip your heart out through your throat and tear it to pieces and feed it to wild animals.”
“So you’re saying I should be grateful?” Malloy almost smiled.
“I’m only offering a little perspective, here, that’s all. If you don’t really need me anymore, I’m going to go check this jacket in on Thirty-third and maybe get some sleep before tomorrow. I don’t want to get Vannattered on this evidence.”
Lauren begged to be allowed to take a shower before the nurse started her IV. Adrienne hovered the entire time, shadowing Lauren, leading her from place to place, handing her things she couldn’t see, steadying her as she dried herself off and dr
essed in a clean gown.
Lauren’s terror at being secreted away by a man she couldn’t even see had disintegrated into a jittery fatigue that was taking her prisoner almost as effectively as had the Boulder Police Department. She barely managed to remain awake while the ER nurse inserted a thin catheter into a vein in her wrist.
“Nice shot,” Lauren commented after the nurse began taping the tubing in place.
“Cake,” the nurse said, “your veins are like garden hoses.” Lauren barely heard the reply, and she was fast asleep before the plastic bag of medicine was hung above the infusion pump beside her bed.
The ER doc was the first physician to come back out of the examination room into the hallway.
“Well?” asked Malloy, who did his best to get in the man’s face.
“No apparent trauma from whoever wheeled her away from here. Other than being scared half to death, she looks the same as when I checked her over when she first came in.”
“What about her vision?”
“Not good, and not my department. I’ll let her neurologist deal with that. He should be out soon.” The ER doc turned and started back toward the central desk to check the board.
“Just a minute, Doctor, I’m—”
“The neurologist will fill you in. I have a possible broken hip and an acute abdomen to see. Things are starting to pick up. Duty calls.”
Arbuthnot, the neurologist, came out next.
“Doctor? I’m waiting for a report from you.” Malloy used his most intimidating voice. He had reached a point of exasperation with the picket line of doctors and attorneys he was being forced to shuffle through.
Arbuthnot stuffed his hands into the pockets of his blue jeans. He wasn’t a tall man but he was solid, with wide shoulders and thick legs. He had been a three-time member of the Canadian Olympic luge team and was someone who had never shown a particular susceptibility to intimidation; fear held a whole different meaning to someone who considered it recreation to shoot down ice troughs at seventy miles an hour on a sled the size of a cookie sheet.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you there,” Dr. Arbuthnot said to Malloy. “Lauren asked that I not divulge her medical condition to you or anyone else, Detective. She did authorize me to inform you that she is currently suffering an acute condition called a bilateral optic neuritis, which I am treating with intravenous medication. She’ll be staying here with us for a few days.” He offered a small smile as consolation.
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