Now the old guy looked at me and frowned. Perhaps he did not trust his vision. He tried to raise the fax pleadingly toward me.
Somewhere across the room I heard Junior Gestapo Brent’s loud, vindictive voice: “Oh, she’s back now?” and I knew I had to move. To Donna’s office now, ignoring various interested questions as I passed my coworkers. “Is that blood?” “Did you know Terry Bronk wants to see you?” “Are you hurt?” “Did you fall?” And my favorite, “Carol, did you know your head is bleeding?”
Luckily, being covered in blood and dirt, and spouting insanity, keeps people from wanting to touch you, so no one dared to put a restraining hand on me. At Donna’s office door, I stumbled to a halt and said, “Have you talked to Charlene?”
As she looked up at me, all the blood drained from Donna’s face. Her hand reached blindly for her phone and picked it up, holding it in midair as if it might offer some assistance.
“Charlene Templeton!” I shouted at her.
“Carol!” barked the scariest voice at MBS&K. No, it was not Terry Bronk. It was Lloyd. I whirled around with claws bared.
“Charlene came into the file room, grabbed a red-rope file off the shelf, and ran out again,” Lloyd explained. His appraisal of me was no different today, as I stood wavering and covered with all kinds of interesting gunk, than it had been on the day I’d curled my hair and put on extra makeup.
“She, she,” stammered Donna, “she said she had an emergency and had to leave.”
“Well crap!” I yelled at no one in particular. I hurried back toward the front of the office and Lucille.
Right into my pathway stepped Junior Gestapo Brent. He raised a finger to point at me in accusation and victory but, thanks to horror at my appearance, was unable to complete what I’m sure had been a well-rehearsed telling-off. I shoved past him. Behind me he said weakly, “Hey, you can’t come to work looking like that,” and Donna’s voice came right behind it, “Carol, what’s happening? Do you need a doctor?”
I did not fully realize until I was back in front of Lucille that I had picked up a parade of followers: Brent; Donna; elderly Paul holding his fax; bold Melinda and her groupies Mary and Daphne; and Lloyd and the timid little file clerk, Eric. I gave them an unsure glance as I asked desperately, “Did Charlene come back this way?”
“Ah haven’t seen her since she came back from the storage room. Ah’ve called an ambulance. Don’t sit on the furniture.”
“Where could she have—” I began, then to Lucille, “Don’t sit on the furniture?”
“It’s new. You might bleed on it.”
“She took the stairs?” asked Lloyd, who seemed to be the only one who understood that I wanted to get to Charlene badly enough that I was willing to run around bleeding to death to do it.
“Well, crap!” I shouted again and pushed toward the elevators. Over my aching shoulder, I added to Lucille, “Call Detective Haglund at the KCPD and tell him that Charlene Templeton confessed to me and to get over here as fast as he can. I’ve got to get down to the garage.”
“What’s happening?” Donna, Brent, Melinda, and Eric the File Clerk cried almost simultaneously as we waited for the infernally slow machine to haul itself back to our floor.
“Charlene Templeton told me that she’s been killing the widows,” I said.
Some of the responses I heard to this comment were, “You’re kidding,” “You’re crazy,” “You’re full of it,” and “Your head is really bleeding a lot,” but I’m not sure who said what because I had closed my eyes to try and gather the focus I needed to stay coherent for maybe five more minutes. All of us piled into the elevator, though I think that they were mostly going along to see what I was going to do next, or how far I’d make it, and not so much to aid me in any attempts at apprehension.
Leaning against the elevator wall now and speaking through a furry-sounding haze, I said, “If I’m right, Charlene’s leaving here with a file full of evidence that she’s been hoarding. I’m not positive that a case can made against her if she gets away and destroys it. And if we can’t make a case, then we’ll never really be able to clear Bill.”
Donna was the only one of the bunch who wanted to get near me. Standing at my side she said, “Carol, I want you to sit down. I don’t think you realize how badly you’re hurt.”
“I will. In just a minute. Just let’s get to her first.”
We were in the basement, spilling into the P2 level garage, when I saw Charlene’s red Corolla at the garage doors, just sitting there, idling. Why, it was almost as if she couldn’t get out the door. Ha ha.
As a group we approached, with bloody, bedraggled me at the head. When Charlene finally realized we were there and focused with horror on my face, I pulled her keycard out of my pocket and waved it at her.
She flung her car door open and leapt out. Her car, which had been in “drive,” rolled forward and thunked loudly against the garage door. Eric the File Clerk hurried over and leapt inside, nimble youngster that he was, and put the car in “park” while Charlene stood before me, hands spread.
“Oh my God,” she said directly to me, “Carol, I’m so glad you’re okay. I’m sorry I had to hit you, but I have a right to defend myself.” Now to the crowd she said, “Carol was accusing me of killing the widows, and I was trying to tell her that accusing other people wouldn’t keep them from discovering what Bill had done…but she was so insistent. She’s determined to protect her boss!”
“Is this the file you meant?” asked Eric, lifting the red-rope file off the front seat of Charlene’s car. He yelped and dropped it, when what appeared to be a hunk of hair fell out. Looking a little queasy, he got out of the car.
Charlene looked at him sharply and then turned her extremely annoyed eyes back to me. “Give me my damned keycard. You’re always doing this. If you use something, put it back where you found it. It’s not hard. But all the time, you’ve got the high-volume, three-hole punch just sitting on your desk when it should be back in the file room, or you’ve got the packing tape stuck in your drawer—”
“What do you mean, all the time?” I demanded, plucking her card out of her reach when she made a grab for it. “One flipping time I had the three-hole punch, and I wasn’t finished with it!”
“You never fill out your docket sheets correctly! Plus you’re a mouse-clicker; didn’t anyone ever teach you how to use a keyboard?”
I drew back in shock—what a nasty thing to say. I cried back, “Well, you’re the food bandit, and I’ve known it for months!”
“Shut up!” Charlene gasped at me.
There was suddenly hushed silence in the crowd surrounding us.
“Ladies,” Donna said loudly, “I think what we need to do right now is have everyone just come inside, and we’ll wait for the police and Carol’s ambulance to come. Let’s go back upstairs now.”
Charlene glanced toward the glass exit door as if she might run for it. But, let’s be serious here, a nearly fifty-year-old, out-of-shape secretary was not going to be able to outrun any of us, except for me in my present state and elderly Paul with the fax in his hand. Brave little Eric the File Clerk, who had stopped the car and touched the hair-filled file, was now placing himself between her and the door because he had decided to continue his fine tradition of heroism.
“Good,” said Donna, as if she had understood both Charlene’s intent and her rethinking of it. “Come on. Everybody inside.”
“Yes, let’s all go inside and wait for the police,” announced Junior Gestapo Brent, probably so he could claim that his cool-headed thinking had saved the day. If I fell against him, I could get blood all over his shirt and tie…but no, I didn’t like the thought of touching him.
The elderly attorney Paul turned away, murmuring something about someone maybe helping him send his fax, and Eric the Heroic File Clerk went to take care of Charlene’s car. I vaguely saw Charlene snatch her arm away as Junior Gestapo Brent tried to take her in hand.
Donna gently suggested,
“Carol, let me help you.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. I had quite suddenly lost my ability to remain upright. “I think I’ll just wait here.”
I did not crumple, precisely, but I did sink with unexpected grace (unexpected to me, anyway) to the garage floor. The floor was hard and filthy. Still, it seemed cool, and I thought I might like to rest my aching head against it. There were voices all around me, but until one of them said something interesting or useful, I thought I could just tune them out.
Chapter Eighteen
If you’ve ever been to the emergency room, particularly if you’ve been escorted there by a couple of football-league sized paramedic women, you know that the medical community enjoys hearing the story of your injuries almost as much as a bunch of detectives at the Kansas City Police Department might. But after the third or fourth time I said, “My coworker beaned me twice with a file cabinet bracket and then pushed a shelf on top of me,” it didn’t even sound like the truth any more. I got a lot of significant “looks” from my listeners.
The paramedic women, who rescued MBS&K from the chance that I might bleed on the furniture, exchanged so many “looks” that I thought they might drop me off at the local insane asylum rather than the hospital. I was willing to forgive them because they gave me a whopping dose of pain medication and let me lie down on their gurney—at that point, they could have left me on the side of the highway and I would have been at peace. I didn’t even notice them strapping immobilizers onto my neck. I was breathing and drugged, and that’s what was important.
At the Emergency Room, I was forced to rouse myself out of the drug stupor and tell four doctors, eighteen nurses and seven radiologists the same blunt sentence. Their reactions were even less supportive. People wanted to know why my coworker would do such a thing. “That’s a damned good question,” I would respond. I was given a CAT scan, and they x-rayed me from head to toe, which took forever. The two lacerations on my head were stitched closed. Though the young intern who did the stitching assured me that it had taken a total of seventeen stitches, I will bet money that it was more like seventy. In a strange turn of events, the anesthetic he used to numb my head was more painful than the fishhook he kept cramming into my cranium.
When he was finished, I begged for more painkillers, and they were given to me willingly. Apparently I looked a fright. I know that my entire body was beginning to feel like I’d been dropped from a tall building onto a parking lot and, when I dared to look down at myself, I saw some startlingly large bruises forming on my arms and legs.
I was wheeled back into a room that looked temporary, helped onto a reclining examination table, and informed that I should make myself comfortable while I waited for all those scans to come back. I looked up to the nurse who had brought me here, a small dark woman with a reassuringly sweet face and a name tag that said “Serita,” and asked, “Where are my clothes?”
“Carol, don’t you remember? They were cut off you.”
“Cut off?” I had been wrapped up in a hospital robe almost as soon as I’d arrived, but I didn’t remember anyone cutting anything off me. If I didn’t have any shattered bones, they were going to send me out of here—my insurance wasn’t that great—and I didn’t even have shoes to walk home in. “Why’d they cut them off?”
“We didn’t know the extent of your injuries so we needed to undress you.”
“My favorite skirt?”
“Oh, it was all but ruined anyway. I am sorry. You can have a friend bring you some clothes from home,” said Serita.
“Ruined?” I asked again, looking away. That had been my favorite skirt. That was my go-to skirt. And the blouse had an embroidered collar that had pushed its price into the stratosphere. Ruined? “That bitch,” I said under my breath. It was the first moment that I was able to get angry at Charlene for something she’d done to me rather than to Bill.
Serita left me alone with my mounting rage.
And here’s another thing—where was everyone? All that had happened to me since that nice nap on the garage floor had been me responding to medically trained bullies who demanded my explanation of why I worked with crazy people. Shouldn’t police officers be swarming around me? Shouldn’t the press be crowding in the emergency room, wanting to take my picture? Was that something that only happened on television? Maybe so. But I rather resented that nobody from MBS&K had come to check on me. I guess I was in that much trouble.
I formulated a plan of action that would swing into effect after I heard my test results. Step One: demand a prescription for painkillers that would make me unable to feel anything for the next two weeks. Step Two: find my cell phone and call my parents to come and rescue me and to bring clothes. Step Three: come up with more steps later. I went to sleep on the narrow little hospital bed before I fully got through Step Three.
But they don’t like people to sleep in hospitals, and there is a vast plan of action to prevent you from dozing more than half an hour at a time. The intern woke me to say that I was covered with contusions—uh, yeah, I had guessed that, but then, I don’t have a medical degree—but that, bone-wise, I seemed to be unbroken. I could expect, said the intern, to feel some soreness and discomfort over the next several days. “Soreness and discomfort” are medical code words that mean “pain so excruciating you won’t be able to blink,” which I gleaned when he gave me a stack of prescriptions for anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxers, and painkillers that was almost as thick as a Reader’s Digest.
“Can I go home?” I asked him. I wanted to be near my television.
“I’ll authorize your release provided you have someone who’ll stay with you for the next few days,” he said, “but I think you’re supposed to talk to Detective Haglund first.”
Glad as I was to hear that Gus was at the hospital, I wished I’d had a chance to comb my hair. But judging from his expression when he entered the room, combing my hair would have done little to help. He stared at me with undisguised horror.
“That good, huh?” I asked. I tried to pull myself into a sitting position.
“No, lie still,” Gus said, rushing to my side. “Oh, good God, honey, why do you keep doing this to yourself?”
“I didn’t do this to myself.”
Glaring at me, he said, “You’re lucky that it looks like a truck ran you down, or I’d strangle you.”
This was perplexing. I wasn’t sure what I’d done wrong. I asked the reason for the potential strangling.
Gus was happy to explode at me, and he ranted, “Because you keep putting yourself in rooms with suspects and inviting them to try to murder you. I don’t understand why you refuse to tell me about these informational revelations until after the suspect has escaped or tried to bludgeon you to death. I could charge you with obstruction of justice. In fact, I’d like to. In fact, I may just do that right now.”
“Would that involve a full body search? Because I’m a little sore tonight, but maybe tomorrow?”
He refused to laugh at that. But he stopped yelling at me.
“What’s happening? Did you get Charlene? Did anyone tell you what happened?”
“We have Charlene Templeton in custody,” replied Gus, rather grudgingly. “And I have been to the basement of your firm’s building, where I was not at all happy to see about twenty-eight quarts of your blood and five hundred pounds of paper on the floor. Your boss Bill has been released with a strong suggestion that he stay where we can find him. He tried to come here, but I asked him to go home and leave you alone for now.”
“Aw, Bill’s sweet. And he didn’t do anything,” I insisted. “Charlene’s the one who’s been killing the widows.”
Gus looked toward the door, then moved closer to me and spoke as if he wasn’t really supposed to tell me these things. “She’s not speaking to anyone about that. We can keep her because she attacked you, but she says she only attacked you because you accused her of murder and threatened her. Charlene says you’ll do anything to protect your boss.”
/> “If you thought Bill was guilty, you wouldn’t have just turned him loose.”
“No, I wouldn’t have.”
“So you believe me about Charlene?” I searched his sweet and caring face, but all I saw there was concern. I hoped it was concern, anyway, and not repulsion at my newly-stitched, Frankenstein’s monster look. About Charlene I said, “I think she’s been tracking Bill’s clients through his notes.” I recounted my theory on how Charlene may have managed to gain entrance to homes and convince widows to take suicidal doses of pain medication.
“Okay, honey. I’ve got it. You know we’re going to have to get your statement, but…”
“But she panicked when she learned that a witness saw her leaving Adrienne Maxwell’s house. And she started pointing me in the direction of Bill’s old files. She wanted to set him up. I didn’t even realize I was being led by the nose. I’ll bet she was the one who came to my house last Saturday and tried to make it look like Bill had been there.”
“Someone was at your house on Saturday? You didn’t tell me this.”
“There was a chair that I didn’t sand very well.”
“Carol, would you like me to call the doctor back in here?”
“She’s proud of what she’s been doing,” I remarked suddenly, as much to myself as to him. “I think she considers it a humanitarian act. Maybe if you appeal to her vanity, she’d be willing to talk.”
I noticed that Gus was staring at me cockeyed, as if my words had struck him as precocious or possibly pretentious. I explained, “I watch a lot of detective shows.”
“Yes. Yes, I do know that.”
“There’s something at the office, some kind of evidence, that she said was in a file of Bill’s. She’s been keeping evidence from the crime scenes, maybe just for fun, but now she’s planted it somewhere so it can look bad for Bill. Have you found anything like that?”
Gus looked anxiously toward the door before he responded, “Don’t you remember, Carol? According to your coworkers, you chased her down to the garage while she was trying to get away with the file. We have it.”
My Boss is a Serial Killer Page 25