“That’s good news for Bjorn,” I say.
“So what killed him?” Hurley asks. “Did he have a heart attack?”
Izzy shakes his head. “No, he didn’t. There’s the rub. I haven’t been able to find any cause of death. So for now, I’m listing the cause as undetermined, but I feel pretty certain that the manner is homicide. His heart muscle is in perfect health. In fact, his arteries are some of the best I’ve seen. There’s no evidence of heart disease or a heart attack. I haven’t found any blood clots or hemorrhages, and when I examined his brain, there was no evidence of a stroke. The only findings of any significance are his lungs, which are quite congested, and some cell death I found in some of his tissues. He was in shock for some reason and his body wasn’t getting enough oxygen, but I can’t tell you why. I don’t see any evidence of a severe allergic reaction with anaphylaxis, so at this point I’m leaning toward a poison of some sort. What I can tell you is something we already know from Bjorn—Bernie didn’t die easily. I did find skin and blood under his fingernails and I can’t find any evidence that he scratched himself, so we should have some DNA, but we already know whose it will be.”
Hurley, Izzy, and I all say the same thing at once. “Bjorn.”
Arnie looks around the room at each of us, his brows drawn down with curiosity. “You guys know something I don’t?”
We fill Arnie in on what we know about Bjorn and Bernie in the bathroom.
“It’s ridiculous to suspect Bjorn anyway,” Arnie says. “What possible motive would he have?”
Hurley says, “There’s a rumor afoot at the Twilight Home that Chase was killing off the patients who became more expensive to care for. A number of the patients there seem to think there’s some legitimacy to the idea.”
“Do you?” Arnie asks, sounding excited at the prospect of a real, live conspiracy.
“It would be difficult for him to do,” I say. “But not impossible. Patients in nursing homes are expected to die, particularly the ones who experience health setbacks. Of course, those are the very patients the others think Chase was getting rid of. But even if it’s true, I don’t see Bjorn as the great avenger here. Hell, half the time he can’t remember where he is or what day it is, much less some wild conspiracy. His senility has worsened rapidly over the past few months.”
“Not only that,” Hurley says, “Bjorn is in his eighties. Physically, he manages for the most part, but I don’t think he has the strength or the agility to overpower a man of Bernard’s age.”
“I don’t know,” Arnie says. “My cousin’s mother had Alzheimer’s and most of the time she was weak and pliable as a baby. But occasionally she had these fits of intense rage and anger, and when that happened the woman was strong as an ox.”
“Of course, none of this is relevant given our findings so far,” Izzy says. “It doesn’t take brute strength to poison someone.”
“That’s true,” Hurley says. “If any of the patients at the Twilight Home believe the conspiracy about Chase killing patients, we have a lot of potential suspects, including Bjorn.” There is a moment of silence and then he adds, “Especially Bjorn, since he was probably the last person to see Bernie alive. He already told us there was something wrong with Bernie when he entered that bathroom, so if we’re looking at who had access to Bernie, Bjorn is it.”
“But Bjorn’s proximity was accidental,” I say. “If Bernie was in the building, anyone else who was there could have had access to him. Depending on how fast-acting whatever he was poisoned with is, he might not have even been in the nursing home when the poison was delivered. That means his wife could be a suspect, too, at least until we can narrow down the time line a little better. Do you have any idea what the poison might have been, Izzy?”
“I have lots of ideas, too many, in fact. We’ll run a tox screen to see if anything shows up. If it doesn’t, at least we can rule out some things.”
“Do you think he might have been sedated somehow ?” Hurley asks.
“It’s possible,” Izzy says. “An overdose is one scenario, though his behavior in the bathroom doesn’t really fit with that. Until I get the tox screen results back and look at some more tissue samples on a microscopic level, I’m just guessing.”
“How long?” Hurley asks.
Arnie says, “I can do some preliminary tests for the more common drugs—basic prescription drugs like opiates, benzos, and tricyclics, and the more common street drugs like marijuana, meth, and cocaine. Anything more exotic than that, like GHB or fancier prescription drug levels, will have to get sent to Madison’s lab. Those results will likely take anywhere from a day or two, to a week, depending on what we’re looking for. It would help if we knew what we were looking for. There are hundreds of tests we have the capability of doing, but obviously it doesn’t make sense to do them all. We need to narrow the focus.”
Hurley scrunches his face up in thought. “If a prescription drug was involved, that would imply a staff member rather than a patient, wouldn’t it?”
“Not necessarily,” I say. “Most nursing home patients are on long lists of medications that include any number of potential suspects. While it’s true that the nursing staff generally doles out the drugs, it wouldn’t be that hard for a patient to build up a stash, or even obtain a prescription from a doctor that they then fill elsewhere without the nursing staff knowing about it. That would tend to implicate one of the more independent patients, but I think the nature of this crime leans that way, anyhow.”
“What sort of time frame are we looking at for the onset of action for the majority of the causative poisons?” Hurley asks.
Izzy thinks about it for a moment. “I’d say you’re looking at a two to three hour window at the most. There are some poisons that are much faster-acting than that, but anything slower-acting that had to build up over time, like arsenic or thallium, would have caused long-term disability and illness prior to death. I think we can safely rule those out since we have no indications that Bernie was sick at all prior to today. The delivery method of whatever killed him might impact the time, too. Something injected would act faster than something ingested. I found no evidence of any injection sites on his skin anywhere, but I’ll take another look just to be sure.”
“Can you give me a time of death?”
“I can,” Izzy says. “Based on lividity, rigor, and body temp, he died somewhere between ten and eleven this morning.”
“So maybe we can narrow down our suspects by figuring out who had access to Bernie between the hours of seven and eleven this morning,” I say.
Hurley scoffs. “Yeah, that narrows it down to all of the nursing home patients, Irene, Bjorn, Chase’s wife, and all of the nursing home staff who were on duty.”
“We should search all of the patient rooms,” I say. “Maybe we can find a stash of pills somewhere. And we should talk to the patients, too. They all love to gossip and someone might know if someone else has a little stash of something they keep on the side.”
“I’ll have to get a search warrant,” Hurley says. “There are sixty rooms in that place, plus the ancillary areas like the cafeteria, the administrative offices, the therapy rooms. . . .” He shakes his head and sighs, then takes out his cell phone and punches in some numbers. “I’m going to have to call in some extra manpower. Between the patients, the room searches, and the staff at that place, we have a lot of interviews and territory to cover.”
He steps outside into the hallway and I can hear the murmur of his voice as he talks into the phone. A minute or so later, he reenters the autopsy room and looks directly at me.
“I’ve got extra people coming in to assist with the search and the interviews, but I still have to call to get a warrant. I’m hoping that won’t take more than an hour. Mattie, I want you to be involved with this. Your nursing experience will come in handy if we do come across any pills, and I think you can help us with the interviews, too.”
“No problem. I’m happy to help.” I cast a glance at Izzy,
who nods in agreement.
Hurley glances at his watch. “I’ll schedule a planning session over at the police station for an hour from now. Let’s say three-thirty. We’ll have the extra help there and we can divvy up the tasks to make sure we get it all done. I’ll work on the search warrant in the meantime. Izzy, let me know if you come across any other good information that might be helpful.”
“I will, but I’m essentially done with the autopsy at this point so I don’t anticipate anything more here. We’ll let you know when we get the results of the tox screen back.”
I follow Hurley out of the autopsy suite, and as we pass the men’s bathroom in the hallway, he grabs my arm and drags me inside before I know what he’s doing. Then he pulls me to him so that we are in full frontal contact.
“Hurley, are you crazy? I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do this.”
“Do what?” Hurley whispers and then his lips descend upon mine before I have a chance to answer.
I give in to the sensations for several delicious seconds before reality brings me back to earth. “This is too public,” I gasp. “Someone could come in. If we get caught, it will ruin everything.”
“I can’t help it. I miss you. I want you,” he says, his voice deep and exciting.
“We shouldn’t.”
Hurley lays down a line of light butterfly kisses along the side of my neck. His hand snakes its way under my shirt and suddenly I’m very certain we should. “I think I want to create my own nipple incident since you won’t tell me about the first one,” he says.
I try one last protest. “It’s not safe. Someone will catch us.” Even as I say this, the idea of getting caught ramps up my hormones.
“Who’s going to come in?” Hurley whispers. “Izzy and Arnie are tied up in the autopsy suite, Emily is occupied in the library, and the only other employee who might be here is Cass, and I don’t think she’ll use the men’s room no matter what disguise she might happen to be in today.”
I struggle to come up with another objection to Hurley’s advances, but the sensations coursing through my body muddle my mind. Once again, I’m a goner.
Chapter 12
Ten very hectic but satisfying minutes later, Hurley and I exit the men’s room. Hurley goes first to make sure no one is in the hallway outside the bathroom, and as soon as he determines the coast is clear, he signals for me to come out. We pull ourselves together, straighten our clothing and hair, and mutter something about never doing that again. After a quick discussion, Hurley heads for the police station while I make my way to the library and Emily, who I had temporarily forgotten about. I find her seated at the table where we left her, engrossed in a book. She looks up and smiles at me when I enter.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
She lifts the book and lets me see the cover. I’m a little surprised by her choice. While I expected her to be more drawn to the medicolegal textbooks that discuss and depict dead bodies and the steps necessary to determine how they got that way, she has chosen a book on facial recognition. She has it open to a page highlighting clay sculpture.
“Does that interest you?” I ask.
“It does. I had no idea how scientific this was. I saw a show on TV once that talked about how a scientist identified a body using clay sculpture, but I thought her primary expertise was artistic. Now I see that it’s as much science as it is art.”
“Very much so. Researchers spent a lot of time, study, and years figuring out the various skin and tissue depths as it relates to bone structure for different races of people. They have compiled all that data, and the artists who do facial recognition, whether it be through clay sculpture, drawing, or computer graphics, have to know how to apply it.”
“I like to draw,” Emily says. “I made a little money last year at school drawing portraits of some of my classmates and selling them. I was hoping to make enough to help Mom be able to keep the house, but that didn’t happen. Maybe if I’d gone to school with a bunch of rich kids it would have been different. But most of the kids at that school weren’t any better off than I was. So even though I was able to sell the pictures, I didn’t sell them for much.”
“If you were able to sell the pictures at all you must be quite good. In fact, if you were able to sell to people who didn’t have much money, you must be really good.”
Emily shrugs. “My mom thinks I’m good. She wanted to send me to art school but we couldn’t afford it.”
“Are you taking any art classes at school here?”
“Yeah, but it’s pretty basic stuff.”
“Maybe once you and your mom get back on your feet, art school can be an option for you again.”
“I doubt it,” Emily says with a weary smile. She sounds defeated and depressed and I find myself wondering just how awful her life was in Chicago.
“Hurley and I need to head up a strategy session over at the police station. He’s calling in recruits to help because we have a lot of territory to cover and a lot of suspects to work through in the case we have.”
“So was your victim murdered?”
“It appears so.”
“Is the victim a man or a woman?”
“Man.”
“How did he die?”
“We’re not sure yet. Some kind of poison or medication we think.”
“Why do you have so many suspects? Did a lot of people hate the guy?”
“Possibly.” I don’t want to say too much more given that it’s an ongoing investigation. I could always tell Emily to keep what I tell her a secret, but if there is one thing I’ve learned from living in a small town, it’s that the only secret you can guarantee will stay that way is the one you never share. “Would you like Hurley to take you home?”
“If it’s okay with you, I’d like to stay here and finish reading this. It’s kind of fun.”
“I think that will be okay. Can I get you a snack of some sort?”
“No thanks. I’m fine.”
“We should be done with our meeting around four I think. Do you know Hurley’s cell number?”
She shakes her head, so I look it up on my cell and write it down for her. “If you need anything, just use the phone in here to call Hurley.”
“Is that what you call him all the time?”
“Who? What? You mean Hurley?”
She nods.
“Yeah, I guess I do, though I’m not sure why.”
“You like him, don’t you?”
“Sure. He’s a great guy and a good detective.”
“No, I mean you like him. In a lovey-dovey way.”
I hesitate to answer her, because I’m not sure how honest I should be. I know I can’t be totally honest. The little sessions Hurley and I had today must stay secret if I’m to keep my job. In a way it’s a shame since I’m pretty sure they’d count toward my exercise totals in the diary Gunther wants me to keep. But I also don’t want to lie too openly to Emily. She already knows Hurley and I had something going on when she and her mom showed up. So I decide to go with half-truths for now.
“I had feelings for Hurley, yes,” I say. “And maybe if things had worked out differently, it could have led to something. But it seems it wasn’t meant to be. Everything has worked against the two of us ending up together. My office has been assigned oversight duties with the police department, and they’ve been assigned the same thing with us. That means each of us is policing the other to make sure everything is done right. In order for us to work together, we can’t have a conflict of interest that might keep either of us from being totally honest in our scrutiny of the other. A romantic relationship qualifies as a conflict of interest.”
“So quit your job,” Emily says with a shrug, as if the answer is so obvious any idiot could figure it out. I envy her naïveté.
“I did. But the new job I thought I had fell through, and you and your mom showed up, and it just seemed like it wasn’t meant to be. So now I’m back at this job, which I love by the way. And Hurley and I are
partners and nothing more.”
“Things don’t always work out the way we want them to, do they?” Her tone is one of resigned acceptance.
“No, they don’t. It must be hard for you, all this change.”
She shrugs again, her expression an attempt at indifference that I don’t buy. “You go with the flow.”
I reach over and give her arm a gentle squeeze. The gesture seems to embarrass her and she suddenly becomes engrossed in her book again.
“I’ll be back in a little while. Call if you need anything.” I leave her in the library and head back to the autopsy suite. Bernie has been sewn back up and Arnie and Izzy are cleaning the room. I poke my head in and even though I know the answer, I ask, “Anything new?”
Izzy, as expected, shakes his head.
Arnie, however, surprises me. “Yeah, I had a thought. We should get a list of all the recent deaths at that nursing home and look at their records to see if there is anything suspicious. Just to see if maybe this guy really was killing people off.” His face lights up as he speaks. This is what Arnie lives for, a real live conspiracy right here at home. “We might need to do some exhumations and autopsy any of the ones that look suspicious.”
Izzy says, “That’s assuming the bodies are still available. These days people are as likely to be cremated as they are buried. Plus I’m not sure the DA would be willing to spend the money necessary to do all that, especially if the perpetrator is already dead.”
“Besides, the autopsies might not help,” I say. “Irene told me she thought Bernard was varying his methods to avoid anyone catching on.”
Arnie isn’t going to give up that easily. I know he’s hoping to uncover some sort of plot here, because being able to verify even one real conspiracy lends a level of validation to all the others. “We should at least look at the death rates and compare them to other facilities. If the Twilight Home’s numbers are way out of line, that would mean something, wouldn’t it?”
Board Stiff (Mattie Winston Mysteries) Page 10