She brightened up at his comment and caressed one of the glossy banisters before her. “Living in such a luxurious environment, I do feel like a princess.”
“Yes, Sweet Breeze fits you.”
“Thank goodness I got in before they changed the requirements. Now the residents need more than Medi-Medi and Social Security to be accepted in. Sweet Breeze requires a supplemental fee, either from a pension or family funds.”
Anastasia had a lot of insight about the place, Winston thought. “Can you shed any light on Joe’s death?” he asked. “I’m especially interested about the day he died. Did you see or hear him throwing up at all?”
“He was fine that morning. Shared the usual coffee and watched Jazzman work his magic on the piano.” She wrinkled her brow. “I did hear a noise while taking my beauty rest. I sleep best during the early afternoon because all the night snoring disturbs me. Think princess and the pea.”
“But you woke up that day?”
“Yes, I heard Joe talking in his sleep again. He said something like, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ At first, I didn’t think too much of it. I mean, we did have the mystery meatloaf for lunch. Later, he started coughing.”
“Do you know when this occurred?”
“I’m not sure when he started mumbling, but the coughing happened right after two.”
“How did you get that time?”
“I looked at the clock. I didn’t want to miss bingo. I’m a pro at the game.” She pointed at her large topaz ring. “I paid for this beauty with one of my winnings.”
“Did Joe ever stop coughing?”
“No. In fact, it got worse. That’s when I called for Kristy to check on him again.”
“What do you mean, ‘again’?”
“Well, Kristy always goes to Joe’s room at one thirty to start his dialysis. He made those retching sounds for so long I got worried.”
“Nobody else entered his room before Kristy checked on him the second time?”
“I didn’t hear anybody except Kristy. You know, there’s a creaking that comes from a loose board outside my room. Everybody squeaks it, although Kristy has the lightest step. It’s only a faint whisper with her feet.”
“I see, Anastasia.” Winston squared his shoulders and gritted his teeth as he left.
CHAPTER 16
Winston stalked down every corridor of Sweet Breeze hunting for Kristy. In a twist of irony, he found her outside of Joe’s old abode, now Harold Meekings’s new quarters. She closed the door behind her and was stepping out into the hallway when he sprang upon her.
“When were you going to tell me about the IV bags, Kristy?”
“Winston!” She placed one strong but delicate hand against her chest. “You startled me.”
“The bags, Kristy.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Joe’s IV bags.”
“Do you mean his dialysis bags? What about them?”
“I told you they were torn before. Now I know why—because somebody was trying to get rid of incriminating evidence.”
“They were intact when I hooked them to his catheter. They looked normal, no weird precipitate or anything. Clear as spring water.”
“Oh, so I suppose you didn’t notice the giant rips in them when you cleaned his mess up.”
“I told you before that I didn’t see anything.” She counted to five under her breath. “You know, the dead body was the more noticeable item.”
Her sarcasm didn’t faze him. “Did you overlook the vomit, too?”
Kristy bit her lip, as if remembering the scene. “He did throw up, but I wrapped everything up in the Chux and tossed it out.”
“How convenient.” Winston pointed a finger at her. “It’s easy to overlook the evidence when you’re covering up a crime, huh?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you accusing me of something?”
“I think you poisoned him, Kristy. You swapped out his special dialysis liquid for something more deadly. Then you ripped holes in the bags to spill out the poison. Cleaned it all up and tossed it in the trash, like the good little nurse you are.”
“You can’t be serious.” Her deep brown eyes bored into him. “You seemed like a better judge of character. I even thought you liked me.”
“That’s why they say you shouldn’t mix business with pleasure, Kristy. What kind of poison was it?”
She placed her hands on her hips. “Let’s get this straight, Winston. I would never, ever hurt one of my patients.”
He agreed. She wouldn’t do it out of straight malice. “What if you were easing his suffering? Securing a better death for him?”
“No, Winston. I’m in this job because I like it, even with the pension and benefits disappearing. I’m in it because life holds meaning for me, not death. I would have given anything for one more day, one more minute with my parents.” Her voice rang out strong in the enclosed space. “You remember when I told you my grandparents raised me all by themselves? It’s because my folks got killed in a car accident. An anniversary road trip on historic Route 66 turned tragic when my dad fell asleep at the wheel and swerved into a semi-truck.”
“You didn’t tell me this before.”
“It was our first date. What did you expect? And does it make a difference on how you view me? Am I suddenly more trustworthy because of my sad life story?”
Winston heard Harold coughing through the closed door. Kristy turned her head toward the rattling sound. “Even at the end of their lives, I’m invested in each resident. Sure, we need to keep the beds filled, but to me, people aren’t numbers. So excuse me while I do my work. And you know what? Maybe it’s a good time for you to leave.” She slipped back into Harold’s room without another word to him.
CHAPTER 17
Winston stormed out of Sweet Breeze’s front door. He didn’t want to work near Kristy’s huffy attitude. Besides, he had some loose ends to tie up.
He surveyed the evidence still lumped in a pile on his office floor. He wasn’t touching the vomit sheets. He eyed the Chux; they still retained splotches of unidentified liquid. He tilted the liquid into a new contact lens case, the only sterile container available in his home. He hoped the drops would indicate the source of poison.
He laid the sample on his scarred table and dialed the number he always called for help. The eleven digits took a while to punch in, but she picked up on the first ring.
“Marcy, I have an important favor to ask of you.”
“And hello to you, too, little brother,” she said. “Thanks for asking how I’m doing.”
“Sorry. I’m on a time-sensitive case.”
“Ah, so you’ve been successful in following your long-time idol, Encyclopedia Brown.”
Unlike your previous career. The words she’d surely left out. He’d sought his fortune in the digital world, much to his parents’ wariness. They understood the raw earth and its produce, not blips on screens. Even at the time of their deaths, they still worried about his unstable job. They’d probably extracted a promise from Marcy to take care of her little brother. Well, he could fend for himself. “Honest to goodness, Marcy. I’m working on a genuine homicide case.”
“Really?” Marcy’s voice shifted from easy teasing to seriousness. “What do you need?”
“I think the victim may have been poisoned. Since you’re the smartest herbologist on the planet, I figured you could test the sample. Maybe I could overnight it by UPS?”
“No.” Her sharp voice cut in. Marcy always had a leader’s commanding tone. “You can’t ship something without knowing what the content is, especially if it’s toxic. You could endanger other people’s lives. Let me think...” She made several clicks with her tongue. “I have a colleague in San Francisco. Ruisa teaches botany at the San Francisco College of Herbalism. She’ll have access to a decent lab there. I’ll call her up now and tell her to expect you in an hour. How’s that?”
“Sounds good, Marcy. I o
we you one.”
“Mmm-hmm. I’ll put it on your tab.”
Winston took off in his Accord to find the college. Despite the word “San Francisco” in its name, the campus lay closer to Millbrae. He was glad to shorten the drive by a good thirty minutes. He went around the drivers headed to the nearby international airport and took local streets to get to his destination.
He double-checked the address when he arrived at a rusty brown building. It looked like nothing more than a dilapidated apartment complex. On its front door where a trusty doorman might have held reign decades ago, a hand-painted sign read, “San Francisco College of Herbalism.”
Winston pushed the door open. He went to the sole elevator, where a directory indicated that Ms. Ruisa Taz’s office lay on the third floor. He took the elevator, a cramped contraption with a grated gate, and it abandoned him in a musty hallway. No framed pictures altered the deserted feel. He found Room 302 and used the brass knocker to announce his presence. No answer. He discovered the door unlocked and twisted the handle open.
Despite the creaking protest of the door hinges, the woman inside didn’t turn her head toward him. She was bent over a microscope, her hands gripping its base.
“Excuse me, Ruisa? I’m Winston Wong, Marcy’s brother.”
She turned around and spotted him. “Oh, sorry. I lost track of time. Did you have any trouble with the directions?”
The woman’s hands moved up and down with her words, punctuating each syllable. She was a vision of ‘80s fashion, from the denim shirt to the jeans jacket and Jordache pants.
“I wasn’t quite sure I located the right building in the beginning. It doesn’t look like the typical university.”
“We’re on a tight budget here. Don’t let looks deceive you, though.” Ruisa paused here and ran a hand down her lion’s mane of tangled hair. “We’re one of the best schools in herbalism.”
“I don’t doubt it.” But Winston wasn’t sure how many schools did specialize in herbalism. It seemed like a rare subject to study.
“Marcy said you wanted me to look at a sample?” Ruisa asked.
He offered her the contact lens case.
“Um, I wear glasses.” She pointed to the thin gold frames perched on her nose.
“No, I put the liquid in here.”
“Interesting choice of a container. It’s no matter,” Ruisa said, “I have a state of the art lab.” She gestured around the room.
He took in the beakers and pipettes arranged in haphazard array on her work counter. At least, the Bunsen burner was turned off. “How long do you think it’ll take to get a result?”
“Well, there are no guarantees.” She rubbed her forehead. “I’m only familiar with natural toxins. If it’s synthetic, you’ll be out of luck. Do you know anything more about the substance?”
“It’s clear and odorless.” He thought back to Anastasia’s observation. “It also takes effect pretty rapidly and produces extreme vomiting.”
“That’s something to start with. I’ll call you if I find anything.” She took down his cell phone number. “You know, I wouldn’t do this for anyone except Marcy. She’s a sweetheart, and she doesn’t need any more stress in her life. If I can help out one little bit—”
“What do you mean?” Winston asked. He thought his sister handled everything so well.
“You can’t live her kind of lifestyle without feeling some pressure. What with all the speaking engagements at international conferences on top of everything else…”
He raised his eyebrows, but she refused to elaborate.
“Anyway, tell her to take the valerian plain.”
He had no idea what Ruisa was talking about. “Uh, okay.”
“I’ll work on this all night long,” she said and proceeded to turn her back on him and enter her private world again.
CHAPTER 18
Winston wrestled at night with his dreams. An image of Kristy loomed large, her espresso eyes opened wide in hurt and disbelief. I thought you were a better judge of character. Her words rattled around in his brain.
As he bolted awake in the dim gray light, he realized he couldn’t imagine Kristy as a killer. The conviction in her voice hadn’t been rehearsed. Or perhaps he had fallen too hard for her, and he wanted to believe in her innocence. In any case, he decided to review the evidence again. He wasn’t even sure Joe’s death wasn’t natural, but the extreme vomiting Joe had experienced seemed out of the norm.
When he drove to Sweet Breeze and didn’t find Kristy in the main lobby, he sighed in relief. He couldn’t face her anger this early in the morning. He headed for Joe Sawyer’s old room, now occupied by Harold Meekings, for more answers. He didn’t know how he would explain his snooping around to the old man, but it turned out he didn’t have to—Harold was conked out under the soft bedspread. Winston looked around the dark room and spotted a slash of light on the carpeted floor. He moved toward the floor-length green curtains he’d noticed before but never investigated. Their enormous size hid a pair of glass doors that opened to the outside.
Winston stepped into the brilliant sunshine. Suddenly, he heard a shout. He peeked back through the door. Harold, with his eyes closed, was tossing and turning in bed. Sleep talking. Winston sighed in relief and examined his surroundings.
A hedge enclosed a small patio. No bistro chair or mosaic table could fit in the confined space. Still, it held enough room for a killer to hide while Kristy administered her duties, and for somebody to sneak back in and add poison to the dialysis bags after she was done with her work.
Kristy had claimed that the bags were unbroken when she’d started the dialysis. If she was telling the truth, somebody had to have come back to puncture them and destroy the evidence of their tampering. And since nobody had stepped down the hallway according to Anastasia’s creaky step theory, that left only this spot as a means of entering and leaving. Winston looked around the hedge and found a break in the bush. He squeezed through the tight space and found himself in the back of the house. A pathway led right to the back patio. From there, anyone could have entered Joe’s room after an innocent-looking stroll.
Something bothered him, though. The vomiting had occurred quickly after the dialysis started. That meant that the poison had been in the bag already. Who had access to the medicine beforehand?
A new answer occurred to him, and Winston headed back inside Sweet Breeze to investigate his hunch. Intent on his mission, he almost marched right past Kristy at the sideboard serving medicine to Eve. He circled back as he spied her red-rimmed eyes. The puffiness didn’t serve her beautiful brown eyes well.
“I’m sorry I said those terrible things,” Winston said.
She stopped filling the small paper cups with pills. In a weary voice, she said, “You sure seemed angry with me yesterday.”
“I spoke without thinking. Now that I’ve had time to look at all the information, I realize I forgot a prime suspect.”
She fiddled with the key on her neck. “And who would that be?”
“I think—”
Before he could finish, the residents began raising a ruckus about the slow medication dispensation. “I’ll tell you later,” Winston said. “And I’ll make things up to you. I promise.”
He hurried along the staircase and flung open the door to Rob’s office. If anyone had a spare key to the medication cabinet, it was Rob Turner. Besides, wasn’t Rob the first one to point the finger at Kristy? In fact, the locked glass medication cabinet lay in his room, next to a withered potted plant. The residents’ medications were stored in cubbyholes, their names alphabetized along the shelves. Joe’s name appeared in the lineup, but an empty space stretched above his label.
Winston rummaged through Rob’s desk, disrupting official-looking papers, and found a key stuffed in the back recess of a drawer. He slid it out and tried it on the medication case; it fit like a glove. Now he knew for sure that Rob had access to the medicine beforehand. The question was: How to prove that Rob had intended to h
arm Joe? He needed evidence that Rob had known about the poison.
He looked over the documents on the desk again. They were boring papers on company regulations for claiming coverage for the residents. Some unopened mail lay on the side, too, with a tiny Swiss army knife on top. Apparently, Rob used the multipurpose tool to slit his letters. Winston flicked open the blade. A flicker of rust coated its sharp edge. This could have punctured the dialysis bags, he thought.
Winston searched the nearby filing cabinet. Rob’s personal papers lay in there. Details about his salary (or lack thereof) plus his nixed pension and diminishing health insurance made Winston yawn.
He looked at the quiet computer and turned it on. Rob spent more than half his time with the machine. Perhaps his secrets resided there. It booted without a hitch, and Winston explored every file to no avail. In fact, at surface level, Rob seemed a conscientious worker. He even had an ongoing Excel spreadsheet to document his every task and justify his minutes at work. Winston wondered how much of the “reviewing resident files” time involved playing Space Domination instead.
Hmm, Space Domination. He typed in the game’s main website for kicks. It featured zooming comets, grotesque aliens, and high-tech space stations. The log-in ID for “RobTurner” appeared on the screen. The password area remained blank, though. Winston wondered if he could crack the code. He wasn’t a hacker, but he could give it a try. He entered “videogames.” Rob wanted to get in the industry; maybe the phrase would work. No dice.
Winston scanned the room again, and his eyes landed on the framed comic book. Ah-ha. He put in “Eternals.” No. Then he typed, “The Forgotten One,” the name of Rob’s favorite character from the series. He’d mentioned it when Winston had first shown up at Sweet Breeze. Nothing. Wait a minute. There was an alias for The Forgotten One. His fingers produced the name: Gilgamesh.
Rob’s avatar showed up on the screen. In fact, it seemed similar to the comic rendering of The Forgotten One, the sleek version. Rob’s character was dressed in a thick black space suit, his huge muscles defined under the form-fitting material.
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