“Kids and a mortgage and medical bills.”
“Don’t you worry your pretty little head about any of it. We’ll be fine. Your job is to get through this surgery and the rehab, so you can take care of our children.”
She smiled. “That sounds nice.”
He kissed her head. “Let’s tell the police the truth, so they can cross you off their suspect list and stop asking awkward questions.”
“I don’t want—”
“Just the police. No one else, and they don’t need to share that information.”
She was silent for a long time. “You’re afraid they’ll find out, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “The deeper they dig on you, the more likely they are to stumble over me. If we’re open with them about you, they’ll be satisfied.”
She looked at him. “You were there that night, too.”
He nodded. “But I was thrown out before she went missing, so I’m not a suspect. You are, and we need to change that.”
“Who told you I was a suspect?”
He hesitated for a moment. “Ginny Forbes came to the office today, asking questions.”
“That interfering bitch!” Lisa sat up, her eyes furious. “She should keep her nose out of other people’s business or she may find herself getting hurt—again!”
“Lisa, sweetheart, calm down. Please? Here, relax and let me hold you.” He pulled her back into his embrace. “Ignore her. Don’t let her upset you.”
“She pisses me off. She’s such a goody-two-shoes. Thinks she’s better than everyone else.”
“She’s not worth having a stoke over. Ginny Forbes will get what she deserves. Never doubt it.”
He held her gently until she relaxed. It was the aneurysm talking, the blood leaking into the space around the amygdala. (He had learned that word from the doctor, then spent a week looking it up.) Keep her calm, he had said. Keep her blood pressure down. And no sex.
Isaac lifted her hair and brought it to his lips. When they made love again, he promised himself, it would be without fear, and with the rabbi’s blessing, and for the purpose of having children. God allowed for redemption in his chosen people. If he turned over a new leaf and sinned no more, that would be enough.
He would start looking for a new home today, a new place to start a new life. One without temptation, perhaps. Yes, that might be a good thing, finding a job that didn’t have the kind of temptation he’d fallen victim to. Because he was a victim. God couldn’t really expect human beings to be that strong. After all, original sin was His idea. What he needed was to move quietly away from this city—and this police investigation—and try again somewhere else.
* * *
Chapter 29
Day 12 – Tuesday noon
Forbes residence
“Is there any way we can eliminate some of these people so I won’t feel so useless?”
At the end of her last conversation with Detective Tran, Ginny had asked for and received (via courier) several packets of information, with a reminder that she was not to share them with anyone other than Jim without express permission. The first was a list of the people considered to be present, and therefore suspects, on the night Phyllis was killed.
“You can cross your own name off the list,” Jim said.
“Really? Are you sure?” Her tone dripped sarcasm.
“Hey!” He reached over and took her hand, tugging on it until she looked at him. “I’m sure.”
Ginny nodded. “All right, but it doesn’t help much. How are we supposed to narrow this down?”
“We need more clues.”
“You mean like a string of bodies, each bloodier than the last, as the serial killer comes unglued?”
Jim shook his head. “No more bodies, please. Other kinds of clues. What else did Tran give you?”
Ginny handed over a six-page report. “Here are the crime scene forensics. Most of them, anyway. In addition to a sea of DNA, none of which can be identified, they say Phyllis had no drugs in her system when she died. Not even an aspirin. So she wasn’t using and there goes that theory. Also, she wasn’t working undercover for the drug squad. I asked.”
The next stack contained twelve pages. “These are the notes on the video and still images. They’re supposed to identify every person who appears in any image collected that night.” The third sheaf was only ten pages long. “This is similar, except the data was pulled from the ID badge locators.”
Jim made a face. “Did Detective Tran give you any idea what she wants us to do with these?”
“She said she wouldn’t know a clue if it bit her on the nose. She wants us to figure out who was where they shouldn’t have been. Or vice versa. And that’s not all.”
Ginny hefted the remaining stack of files, deciding it must weigh nearly a pound. “These are the witness statements. The only bright spot is that she provided the entire collection in digital form as well, the better to search it with, my dear.”
“Wow.”
“And they say policemen don’t earn their money.” She set the papers down and leaned back in her chair. “What we need is a plan. How are we going to untie this Gordian knot?”
“Cut it.”
“Ha, ha.”
“I’m serious,” Jim said. “Cut to the chase. Means, motive, opportunity.”
“We’ve been over all that.”
“So we do it again.”
She sighed. “Okay. The means was strangulation. What does that tell us?”
“That she was killed by someone strong enough to twist that wire around her neck, and cold blooded enough to leave her dead body in the corner of a hospital bathroom.” Jim frowned heavily. “That still upsets me more than I care to admit. She was so close to help, and none of us knew.”
Ginny nodded. “Tran says the lab is still examining that wire for clues, but so far they haven’t found anything useful.”
“Okay. Motive.”
“To stop her from talking? White hot rage? Jealousy?” Ginny shook her head. “I don’t find any of them very convincing, and there’s no smoking gun.”
“Which leaves opportunity.” Jim’s brow furrowed. “It’s almost a closed room puzzle, though the list of suspects is larger than in the mystery books.”
“And the door was propped open.”
Jim picked up the list of suspects and a pencil. “All right. Tell me who these people are.”
“Four of them are ICU nurses who were working that night: Alice, Susan, Grace, and Ms. Hawkins. I am omitting myself—and Phyllis, of course.”
Jim checked off the names as he came to them. “Okay. Who else?”
“Dr. Jones and Dr. Candajar, both of whom were running Codes. The two Respiratory Therapists, Peter and Dee. The Human Resources guy, Isaac Zimmerman. The House Supervisor, both Code teams, and a lab tech who acted as runner.”
“You’re forgetting the patients.”
“None of our patients were off camera for a moment, not even the guy on cocaine. That rules them out. Ditto the families, who were all pushed out to the waiting room when the first Code started and weren’t let back in until day shift got there.”
“Where are the cameras located?”
“There’s one in the hall facing the Medical ICU entrance. Then one at each end of the Unit. And one in each patient room, trained on the bed. But none of them is a continuous video recording. They all take an image every few seconds and the ones in the hallways pan back and forth.”
Jim nodded, studying the printout. “All four of the ICU nurses show up coming and going about their lawful business.”
“Yes, as do most of the Code team members.”
“Most?”
“As you know, we’re supposed to wear our ID badges at all times, but, being human, sometimes the badges get left behind.”
“And if you get caught without one, they dock your paycheck.”
Ginny nodded. “Right, the idea being that knowing where the staff is helps keep the patients safer. It may ev
en be true. The problem is that Dr. Jones left his in the ER. That’s what he told Detective Tran anyway, and she tells me they found his badge exactly where he said he’d left it.”
“Okay. So he was a naughty boy, but what has that to do with the video evidence? He’s on patient-cam during the Code. Bound to be. He had to intubate.”
“According to the team of investigators whose job it is to watch hours of security video and write down all the movements, he was in and out. He may have left the room, or he may have just stepped out of camera range. Detective Tran has a forensics specialist analyzing the amount of time it would take to leave that ICU patient room, walk to the break room, duck into the bathroom, strangle someone, drag her body into a corner, and get back again—oh, and put on and take off Personal Protective Equipment.”
“PPE. Let’s think about that for a minute. What evidence do we have that the murderer was wearing PPE?”
Ginny picked up the forensics report and flipped through it. “Here. Traces of the nitrile gloves caught in the wire and bits of the paper they use to make the gowns under her fingernails.”
“Okay. The murderer was wearing PPE. That’s not uncommon in an ICU.”
“No, it’s not, but it’s not common in an ICU bathroom. It would look odd if you took a set into the restroom with you, then put it on in there.”
“Could the murderer have worn it in? I know we’re not as careful as we should be sometimes. I’ve been known to strip my gown off while walking to my office, for instance.”
“The rule is that you peel before you leave the patient’s room and put a fresh set on before coming back in, to prevent spreading patient germs around. What’s more, it would be unusual for Dr. Jones to leave the room during a Code.”
“Unless he had to answer a call, nature’s or otherwise.” Jim’s brow furrowed. “Can we eliminate all the men since they wouldn’t go into the ladies’ room?”
“Only if they’re innocent.”
“Well, isn’t that the point?”
Ginny nodded. “What I mean is, a man could go into the ladies’ room, wearing PPE, kill Phyllis, then nip into the men’s room and come out drying his hands and no one would be the wiser, as long as no one saw him. Unfortunately, the bathrooms are not covered by the cameras.”
Jim pulled over a yellow pad. “Can we safely say that anyone located by either badge or camera outside the bathroom during the Window of Opportunity can be dismissed?”
“Badge and camera, since, in addition to leaving them lying around, badges can be attached to other people.”
“Hell. Of course they can.” Jim modified his note. “Okay. That brings us to the WOO.”
Ginny blinked. “The what?”
“Window of Opportunity. I just told you.”
Ginny found herself laughing. “You said, ‘woo.’ You sound like a freight train.”
Jim lifted a quelling eyebrow at her and Ginny subsided, still giggling at the acronym.
“As I started to say,” he gave her a stern look, “the WOO begins when Phyllis enters the ladies’ room. According to Detective Tran’s notes, Phyllis—or her ID badge—entered the facilities at three-twenty a.m.”
Ginny made a note of the time. “Okay. When does the WOO close?”
“Upper limit—when you found the body.”
Ginny had known immediately there was no chance of saving Phyllis. Her body was already cool to touch, and blue, and starting to stiffen (they’d had trouble getting the breathing tube in because she’d been sitting up and her head had slumped onto her chest and her neck had wanted to stay in that position), but they’d had to try. She had dragged Phyllis out onto the bathroom floor and called for help. The day shift had responded with a fresh Code team, but that hadn’t changed the outcome.
“I found her at ten minutes past seven that morning, but when the Medical Examiner saw her at eight, he said she’d been dead for at least two hours and more likely four. The autopsy says the same.”
Jim nodded. “Okay. Pencil in the ME’s estimate of when she died.”
Ginny checked the notes she’d gotten from Detective Tran, then added Time of Death between 0330 and 0600. Her brow furrowed. “If she was dead before the four o’clock vital signs, who did them for her? The murderer?”
“It’s possible.”
“There was someone designated to watch her patients while she ran to the facilities. There always is. I can ask around and find out who that was.” Ginny made herself a note.
Jim nodded. “Okay, do we know the last time she was seen on camera?”
“I don’t, but she was wearing her badge when I found her, and the data says the badge didn’t leave the restroom, so I think we can safely say she went in and didn’t come out again.”
“See if you can find Phyllis on any image after three-twenty a.m.”
They found Phyllis leaving one of her assigned patient rooms at three-fifteen, but no evidence she was seen on camera, alive or dead, after that.
“Which means,” Jim said, “we’re looking for someone who is unaccounted for between three-twenty and six a.m., just a bit over two and one-half hours. That’s progress.”
Ginny sat up straighter. “Yes, it is.” She loaded the digital versions of the files and started searching. “I’m going to make some assumptions here. The first is that no one we eliminate was able to throw on a cloak of invisibility and sneak back into the bathroom without being seen. If they don’t appear in the data, they weren’t there.”
“Agreed.”
“The House Supervisor didn’t linger during either Code, I find a mention of her at two fifty-seven, on the hall camera, leaving the Unit, then a badge ID marker for her at five a.m., coming back in.”
“Scratch one House Supervisor.” Jim’s brown furrowed. “When did that second Code start?”
“Four forty-five.”
“Can we safely say no one from the ER came up to the ICU except as a member of one or the other of the Code teams?”
“Let’s see.” Ginny searched the Who Was Where When file. “I don’t see any ER people on this list.”
“Which means no one on the second Code team was in the ICU soon enough to kill Phyllis.”
“One of them might have left his badge behind, slipped in with no one noticing, done the deed, then gone back to the ER. Can you check to make sure all the ER people on Code Team 2 were actually in the ER until the Code was called?”
Jim bent to the task. “The police must have thought of that. It’s all right here. No one missing from where they should have been from two a.m. until the Code was called.” Jim let his satisfaction show. “All right! Scratch Code Team 2.”
“Good!” Ginny peered at the next record. “Here. Tell me what this says.”
Jim took the document from her and squinted at it, then took it across the room to the window. “Looks like Max Peabody.”
“Oh! I know him. He’s our night security guard, one of them. He would have been doing crowd control.” She plugged his name into the search utility and was quickly able to tell that the security guard had arrived soon after the start of the first Code, then stayed, mostly stationed at the ICU door, until after six a.m. “I remember now. There was some sort of trouble with the visitors. I heard Max and the Supervisor talking about how the families who weren’t involved in the Code wanted to wait at their loved one’s bedside and the ones who were wanted to watch. He didn’t actually threaten anybody, but he may have been tempted.”
“Does his badge go into the break room?”
“Not even once. Does he appear in the images between three-twenty and six?”
It took Jim a minute to track the movements of the security guard. “Here he is, and he’s wearing his badge. He doesn’t enter the patient rooms, just hangs around, then leaves the Unit and goes to the Visitors Area, then back to stand just inside the main door.”
“Can we eliminate him?”
It took the two of them another fifteen minutes to make sure the security guard
’s movements did not include using the ICU men’s room, after which, they decided they could indeed scratch Officer Peabody off the suspects list.
“This is really slow going,” Jim said.
Ginny nodded. “Who else can we eliminate? How about the HR guy, Isaac Zimmerman? When did he leave the Unit?”
“According to the date/time stamps on his images, the last picture he took was at two-twelve.”
“Wait a minute.” Ginny dug into the witness statements. “Here it is. Alice told the police she asked Officer Peabody to escort Mr. Zimmerman out of the Unit and lock the door behind him because he (Zimmerman) was interfering with the Code.”
“Okay. Confirmed. His ID badge leaves the Unit at two thirty-five and is not seen again. Nor does he appear in any of the images that were taken after that time.”
Ginny drew a line through Isaac Zimmerman. “Moving on.”
Jim lifted his arms above his head and stretched. “I have an idea. Let’s attack this from the other side. Who can we NOT eliminate?”
“Anyone who entered the break room between three-twenty and six-ish.”
Jim’s eyes narrowed. “We’d better change that to three-ish. The murderer could have gone in ahead of Phyllis and been lying in wait.”
Ginny pulled up the badge locator data and fed it to Jim. In ten minutes, they had created a new list.
“Here’s you,” Jim said, pointing to an entry.
Ginny nodded. “I, too, had to answer the call of nature that night, though I don’t remember lingering, and I didn’t see anything.”
“Ginny, look closer. Look at the time.”
She peered at the entry. Three thirty. Ten minutes after Phyllis disappeared into the bathroom, never to return. She felt goosebumps rise along her arms.
“Jim! You don’t think—” She stopped.
“That both Phyllis and the murderer were still in there when you arrived? I think it’s possible.”
“But I didn’t hear anything! No gasping noises. No thumps. Nothing.”
“Which probably means she was already dead.”
The Swick and the Dead Page 20