by Lee Goldberg
They stopped cold in the corridor, like two kids caught misbehaving, when they saw Noah Dent, the hospital administrator, leaning against the counter of the nurse's station directly outside of the pathology lab. Dent had a scowl on his face. He merely pointed his index finger sharply at both Jesse and Susan and motioned them to follow him into an empty hospital room.
As soon as they were inside the room, Dent closed the door behind him and confronted the two of them.
"I was under the impression you were both on call down in the emergency room," Dent said.
"We are," Jesse said. "We were conferring on medical matters with Dr. Sloan and Dr. Bentley."
"About a current patient of yours?" Dent said.
"Not exactly," Jesse said. "We confer frequently, to share experience, give advice, that sort of thing."
"I see," Dent said, turning his gaze to Susan. "And what expertise were you contributing to this discussion?"
Susan flushed. "I was hoping to learn something. I'm considering going to medical school, maybe becoming a doctor myself."
"You want to learn something?" Dent asked. "I have a lesson for you. When you're being paid to be a nurse in the emergency room, it's a good idea to actually provide nursing services in the emergency room."
He stared at her. She didn't move.
"Now," Dent said.
Susan shot a glance at Jesse, then hurriedly left the room. Jesse's face tightened with anger and he took a step to ward Dent, who didn't move.
"You had no reason to talk to her that way," Jesse said. "She isn't your dog or your servant."
"And she won't be a nurse at this hospital either if she continues neglecting her duties. She's been coasting on her relationship with Dr. Sloan and enjoying preferential treatment for too long," Dent said. "The same goes for you, Dr. Travis. I know full well what was going on in that pathology lab. You were participating in Dr. Sloan's personal investigation into the killings in Malibu yesterday. And you were doing so on the hospital's time."
"Dr. Sloan is the chief of internal medicine. Every doctor in this hospital seeks out his advice and experience on a daily basis. I don't have to justify the time I spend with him to you or anybody else," Jesse said. "If the ER needs me, they'll page me and I will he there in two minutes."
"Let me be perfectly clear, Dr. Travis, so there's no misunderstanding," Dent said. "When you are in this hospital, you work for me. Your job is downstairs treating patients, not playing detective with Dr. Sloan or discussing autopsies with Dr. Bentley. Unless you are checking on matters that specifically involve one of your patients, there is absolutely no reason for you to be in that pathology lab."
"Dr. Bentley is my friend," Jesse said.
"I'm well aware of that, believe me," Dent said. "I'm also aware that you're sleeping with Nurse Hilliard."
"You're crossing a line here, Dent," Jesse said.
"No, Dr. Travis, it's you who've crossed the line, taking advantage of the trust and authority you've been given by this hospital," Dent replied. "You won't be getting any more special treatment here and neither will Nurse Hilliard. If you want to continue working here, you will adjust your conduct and your priorities. If I see you assisting Dr. Sloan on any thing besides patient care, or using our resources to aid in his detecting hobby, I'll fire you immediately. Do I make myself clear?"
And with that, Dent walked out, not bothering to wait for an answer. He didn't care what Jesse had to say, and fully expected the doctor to violate the rules that had just been laid down.
The message hadn't been meant for Jesse anyway. It was meant for Mark Sloan, and Dent knew that Mark's little acolyte would take it straight to him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By noon, it was impossible to be a living, breathing member of the civilized human race and not know that Lacey McClure's husband had been shot to death in bed with another woman. The airwaves were choked with news about the shocking, "gangland-style murders" of Cleve Kershaw and Amy Butler. There was continuous, live coverage from out side the gates of Lacey McClure's "Brentwood estate" where, depending on which channel was reporting, she was either "bravely confronting her grief' or "barricading herself in seclusion."
Lacey McClure's publicist, the high-powered and heavily accessorized Randi Lofficier, did reveal that the movie star and her husband, Cleve Kershaw, had been quietly separated for some time, which sparked enormous debate among the shocked entertainment reporters, who couldn't imagine how Lacey and Cleve had managed to keep their marital discord from them.
While the eyes of the world were on that important story, Dr. Mark Sloan and Dr. Jesse Travis labored in the Community General emergency room to save the life of a three- week-old baby who'd been brought in by paramedics.
The baby had been found in an open garbage bag in a dumpster in Mar Vista. She was suffering from exposure and hypothermia, her core body temperature a dangerously cool 85 degrees.
Jesse put the baby on heated, humidified oxygen to warm her lungs and asked Susan to start an IV of heated saline to raise the child's body temperature.
But their efforts weren't raising her temperature fast enough, so Mark was forced to perform a partial cardiopulmonary bypass. He placed catheters in both ends of a coiled tube, then made an incision into the child's groin, inserting one catheter in the femoral artery and the other in the femoral vein that was right beside it. The baby's blood began circulating through the tube, which he placed in a bath of hot water.
Within minutes the bypass showed results, raising the baby's core temperature to 93 degrees, much to the relief of Mark, Jesse, and the rest of the ER team. The baby would survive her horrific ordeal.
There wouldn't be any CNN crews covering her plight, no armies of reporters searching for answers and pressing for prompt action.
There wouldn't be any photographers jostling for position to take pictures of the dumpster where the baby was thrown away.
There wouldn't be any continuous live feeds from the alley.
The baby's story was tragic and unfathomable, but there's wasn't any entertainment value in it. What happened to the nameless child wasn't nearly salacious enough to matter.
After a time, Susan swaddled the baby in blankets and escorted her up to the neonatal intensive care unit for observation. Jesse put a call into the state Child Welfare Office to arrange for foster care after the baby's recovery. And Mark went back upstairs to continue his rounds.
Steve was waiting for the elevator when the doors opened on the third floor, Amanda's autopsy reports under his arm.
"Going down?" Steve asked, stepping in.
"I am now." Mark punched the button for the lobby. "How's the investigation going?"
"If this were anything but a celebrity homicide, I'd say it was going great," Steve replied. "I met with the forensic accountant that Lacey hired to go over her husband's books. There's no question there was some financial sleight-of- hand going on, but there's no evidence that it has anything to do with organized crime."
"But it confirms her husband was laundering money for someone?"
"Sure looks that way," Steve said. "Which means she might be right, and have one more strong motive for killing him."
"Usually we're satisfied if we can establish one strong motive for a suspect, and this time we've got two," Mark said. "Shouldn't we be celebrating?"
"I would if I could explain the time of death problem you discovered."
"Did SID come up with anything at the crime scene house?"
"Tons of stuff. I can tell you the chemical composition of the ChapStick on the nightstand, the thread count of the sheets, but nothing that solves our problem," Steve said. "Lacey's fingerprints are all over the beach house and they found dirt particles in the carpet that can be traced back to her place in Mandeville Canyon."
"Which she can argue makes sense, since she's been to that beach house a thousand times," Mark said. "It doesn't prove she was there yesterday afternoon."
"I know," Steve said, a pained look o
n his face. "So far there isn't any evidence against her that she can't refute with a reasonable explanation."
"Do you believe her explanations?"
"Hell no," Steve said as the elevator arrived at the lobby. Mark and Steve got out and made their way down the corridor towards the exit to the parking lot. "I don't buy that she and Cleve were separated, either. His clothes and other belongings were still in both houses. It doesn't look like he moved out to me."
"She did say it was a secret," Mark said.
"I'd say that was her weakest argument," Steve said. "If it wasn't for her lousy alibi."
"Sounds to me like an arrest is imminent."
"It's long overdue and it hasn't even been twenty-four hours since the killings," Steve said. "What's amazing to me is that she hasn't made any public statements accusing the Mob of killing her husband. She hasn't lawyered up. And she's going back to work on her movie tonight. Doesn't she realize she's the prime suspect in a double murder?"
"Let's tell her," Mark said.
"And tip our hand?" Steve asked as he stepped out. "What will that get us?"
Mark shrugged. "Whatever her reaction is," he said, "it's bound to be interesting."
And with that, Mark opened the door to the parking lot and ushered his son out with a grand wave of his arm.
In the early days of filmmaking, and through most of the last century, movies were shot on studio backlots where city streets and suburban neighborhoods were recreated in painstaking detail. The storefronts, office buildings, brownstones, and houses were just fake facades, redressed and repainted for each new production.
But as the city grew, the real estate under the backlots became far too valuable to waste on phony buildings when real ones could generate a lot more cash. The studios razed most of their backlots, and production took to the streets, transforming the entire city of Los Angeles into one enormous stage.
Hundreds of productions are shot in and around the city on any given day. For Angelenos, seeing a film crew at work is as common as seeing a road being repaved or mail being delivered, and garners about as much attention—unless the filming involves a car chase, a shoot-out, or an explosion.
Or one of the actors happens to be at the center of titillating scandal involving adultery, sex, money and murder.
Which was why on the night Mark and Steve visited the downtown location of Kill Storm, a dozen beefy security guards were scrambling to keep hundreds of onlookers and reporters behind barricades erected a block away from the alley where the crew was shooting.
Although Steve's car was an unmarked detective sedan, it might as well have been emblazoned with the LAPD emblem as far as the security guards were concerned. Most of the guards were off-duty cops and immediately recognized the car for what it was, letting Steve pass through without even asking to see his ID.
Steve parked behind a huge mobile home, which seemed to have expanded itself to cover an area twice its original size. There were four push-out sections adding extra rooms to the floor plan, a massive canvas overhang to provide a shaded patio, and enough satellite dishes and antennas on the roof to allow whoever was inside to communicate with other galaxies.
"Gee," Steve said, motioning to the mobile home, "I wonder whose dressing room that is."
Before Mark could respond, a harried looking young man with a walkie-talkie, two cell phones, and a pager clipped to his belt came rushing up.
"You can't park there," the young man said. "That's Lacey McClure's private guest parking."
"We're her private guests," Steve said.
The young man quickly consulted a sheaf of papers that were folded and crammed into his back pocket. "You aren't on the list."
"I am now." Steve flashed his badge. "Steve Sloan, LAPD. And you are?"
"I'm Morgan," the young man said. "Ms. McClure's APA."
"APA?" Mark asked. "You're her accountant?"
"Her first assistant production assistant," Morgan said, glancing at his watch. "Excuse me one second, I have to bring her water."
Morgan rushed into the mobile home, leaving the door open behind him. Steve and Mark followed the young man inside without waiting to be invited.
Steve took one look at the travertine floors, marble countertops, and leather furniture and let out a low whistle, impressed.
"Is there a second assistant production assistant?" Mark asked Morgan.
"And a third. The second assistant production assistant is out getting Ms. McClure a new set of sheets," Morgan said. "She went to take a nap this afternoon and jumped out of bed in a rage. She could feel there were only 250 threads per inch in the sheets."
Steve glanced into the bedroom. The white sheets had been stripped off the king-sized bed and were piled like a snowdrift against the wall, beneath a massive, flat-screen TV.
"She could actually feel the number of threads?" Steve asked.
"Ms. McClure has very sensitive skin," Morgan said, taking bottles of Glacier Peaks water out of the refrigerator and transferring them to a tiny, portable cooler. "She says if she sleeps on anything less than 600 thread count Egyptian or pima cotton sateen sheets, it's like laying on sandpaper."
"Is there something special about that water?" Mark asked. "There's a bottle on her nightstand and, last time we met her, she had one in her hands."
"Glacier Peaks is the only water she drinks," Morgan said, checking a thermometer in the tiny cooler. Satisfied with the temperature reading, he zipped the cooler shut. "It's from a glacier in Antarctica and is shipped directly to her. She demands that it be kept at exactly 68 degrees. She's the same way about carpet. It must be extra heavy, tufted British wool, primarily from Scottish Blackface, Herdwick, and Cheviot sheep."
"She sounds awfully picky," Mark said.
"You mean she's a pain in the ass," Steve said, ducking under the crystal chandelier in the living room to admire her entertainment center.
"She's nothing compared to some actors I've worked with," Morgan said. "A certain Oscar nominee has to have his feet massaged with egg yolks from free-range chickens before he performs a scene."
Morgan's radio crackled and an insistent male voice asked: "What's the ETA on the H2O?"
The beleaguered young man yanked his walkie-talkie from its holster as if he'd been zapped with a cattle prod and quickly responded: "Sixty seconds."
Morgan motioned to Mark and Steve. "Follow me, and I'll take you to her," he said, practically leaping out the door of the mobile home.
Mark and Steve almost had to run to keep up with him, as the APA raced between trucks, over electric cables, and around the enormous lights that illuminated the alley where the night's scenes were being shot.
Morgan edged his way through the intense group of baseball-capped professionals huddled around the cameras and playback monitors and rushed out to Lacey McClure, who stood in the center of the alley in a black leather jumpsuit.
The APA unzipped the little cooler and offered Lacey a bottle. She took a quick drink, put the bottle back in the cooler, and flashed Morgan a superficial smile of thanks. That's when she saw Mark and Steve behind the camera, watching her. Her smile remained, in all its blazing insincerity.
"Is everyone hydrated?" the director asked, his impatience evident in every word.
Lacey glared at him, but it didn't seem to bother the director.
"I'll take that as a yes," the director said, turning to his director of photography, who sat in the canvas chair beside him. "How about you; are we ready?"
"We're set," the director of photography said.
"Great, let's do it," the director said, nodding to his assistant director, who stood in the alley, just outside camera's field of view.
The assistant director took out his walkie-talkie and spoke into it, his voice emanating like a crackling echo from walkie-talkies all over the set. "This will be picture. Every body settle. Quiet please."
"Action!" The director snapped, then hunched over the monitors to watch the scene unfold.
De
lia Storm walked down the dark alley. Three figures peeled out of the darkness around her like shadows coming to life. There were three men, dressed in black, and they carried baseball bats.
One of the men smiled. His yellow teeth looked like they'd been knocked out, mixed together, then shoved back into his mouth in the wrong places. "Didn't anybody tell you it's not safe for a lady to walk alone here at night?"
"I'm not a lady," she said with a thin smile.
"Then what the hell are you?"
"Justice," she hissed, then whirled around and—
"Hold your positions," the director yelled. "Lacey out, Moira in."
The cameraman didn't move and neither did the three men. Lacey hurried behind the camera and another woman, dressed exactly like her, took her place in the alley, assuming the same position Lacey had been in.
"Who is that?" whispered Mark to the APA.
"Moira Cole," Morgan said. "Lacey's stunt double."
At that instant, the director yelled "Action!"
Moira whirled into a spinning kick, hitting the nearest man in the face with her foot and sending his bat flying from his hands. She caught the bat, twirled it in her hands like a baton, and used it to take out the guy next to her, then froze in a martial-arts stance to confront her lone remaining adversary, her head at an angle that obscured her face from the camera's view.
"Hold your positions," the director yelled again, and Moira rushed out and Lacey assumed her final stance. The director waited a moment, then yelled "Action!"
Delia gave her adversary a thin smile. "I hope you've got a good dentist."
"I hope you picked out your tombstone, Storm," the man growled, swinging his bat at her
Delia ducked under his swing, rammed her bat into his gut, and as he doubled over, whacked him across the face with it. The man went down.
She twirled her bat one more time in a self-satisfied show of victory, stepped over the groaning man and continued on her way.
"Don't forget to pick up your teeth before you go home," she said.
"Cut!" The director yelled. "That's a print. Check the gate. Let's move on."