She was Dying Anyway

by P. D. Workman

  I’m dying and I don’t want or need you anymore.

  Zachary pictured that last photo on Lawrence’s computer. Robin going to sleep with a grim smile on her face. Exhausted, but satisfied about having booted a negative force from her life. The Zacharys and the Lawrences took too much time and attention and didn’t give enough back, so they had to be jettisoned at the earliest opportunity. Get rid of the drag and the excess weight.

  They made up names to make it sound like a positive move. Rid yourself of toxic people. Put on your own oxygen mask first. Self-care. Words that would let them justify their selfishness and forget about the wounded and bleeding they left behind.

  Lawrence was looking at Zachary, waiting for his reaction. A long time seemed to have passed since he made his confession. Zachary tried to focus his brain and pull himself out of the past. He’d dealt with worse things than being dumped. He’d dealt with all kinds of pain and abandonment before. Being dumped by Bridget should have been nothing.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice was weak and gravelly. Zachary cleared his throat and tried to speak with confidence and authority. He wasn’t the one who was wounded. Lawrence was. Lawrence was the one who needed reassurance and understanding. “I’m sorry that happened to you. That really sucks.”

  “Yeah.” Lawrence laughed bleakly. “You said it, brother.”

  He looked back at his sculpture again. Zachary looked at the twisted pieces of metal. It was sharp and raw and dangerous-looking. Zachary wasn’t one for abstract art, but he could see the attraction to this one. He could feel the raw emotion and anger when he looked at it. Lawrence was displaying no anger himself. He let it out in his art, but he wasn’t opening up that side of himself to Zachary.

  Had he shown it to Robin? Had he gone back to see her on Thursday with a plan? Get her to take him back, or else?

  “You must have been furious. Her playing with you like that. Acting as if she could make up for the pain with a nice last date. Who does something like that?”

  “Robin could be very manipulative,” Lawrence admitted. “She did things sometimes… she acted like she was playing by the rules when she wasn’t. Not so much manipulating your actions… but trying to manipulate your feelings.”

  Zachary nodded. “I can see that. You were supposed to be grateful to her for that one last day. You were supposed to remember her as being someone generous and loving, not someone who pulled the rug out from under you.”

  “Yeah.” Lawrence sighed, looking up at the large iron sculpture. “So is that all? You found out my secret. You got everything you need now?”

  “I’m sorry. But… I had to know what really happened. I can’t complete my investigation if it’s all built on lies.”

  “Well, congratulations.”

  “I’m not happy about it, Lawrence. But I needed to know.”

  “I didn’t hurt Robin,” Lawrence pronounced. “I couldn’t do that. I’d never do anything to hurt her. If she died because she did too much on Wednesday… that’s not on me. That was all her own plan and her own doing.”

  Chapter Nine

  Z

  achary had a restless night full of broken sleep and annoying fragments of dreams. He replayed the conversation with Lawrence over and over. He saw the slide show of the photos he had viewed, including the last photo that had ever been taken of Robin while she was alive. Worse than that, he re-experienced being dumped by Bridget, time after time. Feeling again with agonizing clarity the shock and pain of her cutting ties with him. He wanted to be fresh in the morning, so he didn’t want to take any pills to help him sleep. That ended up being a mistake. He should have chosen some dopiness and med hangover to looking like a red-eyed zombie in the morning.

  He had decided that a visit with Kenzie was in order. Not over the phone or over dinner this time, but in a more official capacity. He put coffee into his travel mug, put an icepack over his eyes for a few minutes to try to reduce the tell-tale redness, and headed off for the police station. The coroner’s office was in the basement. A lot of the officers knew him and he was no Phillip Marlowe or Magnum P.I., packing heat wherever he went, so getting through security didn’t create any great difficulty.

  In the basement, Kenzie was at her desk, efficiently dealing with the paperwork and incoming phone calls, tapping away at her computer to look things up or book appointments in. She looked up at Zachary’s approach and gave him a little smile.

  “Hey. What are you doing here?”

  “Just thought I’d come and see how everything was going.”

  “Right.” Kenzie laughed. “This isn’t exactly a place that people just drop into for the atmosphere. Not even you, Mr. Zachary Goldman.”

  “Really? I hear people are dying to get in.”

  “Shut up.”

  Zachary couldn’t help snickering. “Okay, I know. I’ve used that one before,” he admitted, “but you have to give me a chance to get warmed up. I’m a little stiff.”

  “Do you want me to find a scalpel and use it on you? Because I will.”

  Zachary smiled. She studied him, her brows going up. She pressed her lips together as if she had just applied her red lipstick.

  “So what’s up with you? You look like hell.”

  “Just one bad night. It’s nothing.”

  “The way you take care of yourself, one bad night could do you in. Have you had anything to eat since I saw you last? You look like the walking dead.”

  “I’ve eaten,” Zachary protested. And he had. A little of the fruit that Bridget had bought. And he had found the time to go grocery shopping, even though he knew both Kenzie and Bridget would be appalled if they saw what had been in his cart and now resided in his kitchen. Prepackaged snacks and meal replacement bars. Frozen pizza, lasagna, and roast beef with potatoes. Energy drinks to supplement his coffee intake. He needed to clear more of Bridget’s food out of the fridge before it went bad. “I told you. I just had a bad night.”

  “I don’t want you ending up in here. No offense, but I don’t need the likes of you cluttering up the drawers. And who knows what Dr. Wiltshire would find when he opened you up. Nothing but coffee and pills, I suspect.”

  Zachary shrugged. “Probably.”

  Kenzie sat back in her chair, stretching and still watching him. “So? What’s up?”

  “Robin Salter dumped Lawrence two days before she died.”

  Kenzie considered this. “How do you know that?”

  “He admitted it to me. I told him I knew he was trying to hide something from me about that last day he spent with her, and he admitted that it had all been the build-up to breaking up with him.”

  “What day? What happened?”

  Zachary briefly described the last date. He held up the thumb drive with the pictures on it. “You want to see?”

  Kenzie reached for it, her eyes widening. “This feels a little voyeuristic,” she confessed, bending down to plug it into her tower. “I don’t really need to see them…”

  But that didn’t stop her from clicking on the drive icon when it popped up on her screen, and scrolling through the pictures. She nodded, her eyes riveted to the display. “Just look at them. They’re trying to act like a lovey-dovey couple, but they couldn’t be farther away from each other. And their expressions… talk about painful. I can’t understand why they would go through this whole charade.”

  “I don’t know when she told him she was dumping him.” Zachary watched the pictures scroll over Kenzie’s screen. “I think he must have known pretty early on, even if she didn’t tell him, that something was wrong. Just look at his face and the way he’s holding his head.” Zachary felt a stabbing pain through his heart. The pain of breaking up with Bridget was still as fresh and raw as it had been that day. The betrayal. The physical illness of losing her, of her abandoning him as some broken thing, just like his mother had done decades before.

  “Zachary!”

  The ringing in his ears was too loud for him to hear Kenzie’s words. He stare
d at the couple on the screen with the feeling of a heavy truck gradually sliding down an icy hill, gravity inexorably getting its own way.

  “Here, sit down.” Kenzie had come around the desk and was shoving a chair behind his knees, forcing Zachary to sit. She put her hand on the back of his neck. “Do you need to put your head between your knees? Do you need to take something?”

  “No.” He forced out the words. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re fine if gray is your natural color. Take a few deep breaths.”

  Zachary did as he was told. His vision gradually expanded until he could see Kenzie and her desk and everything around them instead of just the pictures on the monitor.

  “Maybe you should turn that off.” Zachary motioned to the screen.

  Kenzie frowned, but she did as he said. “They’re your pictures,” she said. “It’s not like this is the first time you’ve seen them.”

  “I know. I don’t know why. Just that I can’t look at them right now. I can’t… I just keep seeing Bridget.”

  “Bridget? Why?”

  Kenzie knew his story, so he wasn’t sure why she couldn’t put it together by herself. “Because she broke up with me while she was in treatment too. I just… can’t seem to separate the two of them. Maybe that’s why Bridget needs to know what happened to Robin. Because they’re so much alike, she sees herself in Robin.”

  “Why would anyone break up while they were going through treatment? I thought that would be when you needed people around you the most.”

  “Yes. But apparently not toxic people.”

  “Toxic,” Kenzie scoffed. “That’s what you call someone who won’t just go along with everything you say and do. The only way you could be toxic to Bridget is if she ate you, and then only because of your meds. She wanted out, pure and simple. She wanted the freedom to do whatever she wanted.”

  It was a lot of insight for someone who had said just a second before that she had no idea why Bridget would break up in the middle of chemotherapy.

  Kenzie removed the drive and handed it back to Zachary. He shoved it down into his pocket.

  “What would it take to get the coroner involved?”

  “In what? In Robin Salter’s death?” Kenzie’s tone jumped several notes.

  Zachary just nodded. He knew it was going to be an uphill battle. He couldn’t just suggest that the coroner look at a death that had been deemed to have been a natural, doctor-attended death. He didn’t have any standing in the case or in the political structure.

  “Good grief, Zachary. You know she had cancer. What proof do you have that it was anything but the cancer?”

  Zachary tapped the drive in his pocket. “I have these pictures. Lawrence’s confession that she dumped him. His statement and the nurse’s, saying that he went back to see Robin on Thursday, after she dumped him. Why would he? If it was you, wouldn’t you stay as far away from her as you could?”

  “Are you telling me you didn’t go back to Bridget and try to convince her to take you back?”

  Zachary swallowed. “She said she needed space, so I gave her space. I thought she’d change her mind in a day or two.”

  “And you never went back to see her to try to talk her into getting back together?”

  Zachary suspected she would only think him dishonest if he continued to deny it. “Well… yes. I did.”

  “And did you poison her?”

  “No!”

  “Then what makes you think that Lawrence did? If you are so struck by the similarities of your cases, then explain that. You had no intention of killing Bridget, did you?”

  “I couldn’t. I would never have even thought of it.”

  “Why would Lawrence?”

  “He’s… he’s suppressing his anger. I can see it in his sculptures. And Bridget didn’t die two days after she broke up with me. Robin did.”

  “What evidence do you have that he had anything to do with her death?”

  “Nothing. She was in more pain the last few days. The doctor and nurses were surprised that she died when she did. It would have been easy to put insulin or something else into her IV. You don’t think it’s enough that she mysteriously died right after they broke up?”

  “She didn’t die mysteriously. She had cancer.”

  “But it wasn’t the cancer that killed her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He looked at her. “I guess I don’t, without an autopsy.”

  “You think you have enough to convince Dr. Wiltshire to do an autopsy? When the body has already been transferred to a funeral home? For all we know, she might have been embalmed or cremated already.”

  “I was hoping that you would talk with Dr. Wiltshire… maybe recommend to him that there was reason to be suspicious.”

  “It’s very irregular. I don’t want to get in trouble for getting involved in something that is none of my business.”

  “Isn’t it your business to find out why people died?”

  “People who come in here through proper channels. We can’t investigate every single death.”

  “I think there’s enough here to at least give it another look.”

  Kenzie looked at her computer, ignoring Zachary. For a few minutes, they each sat there, Zachary trying to think of what he could say to convince Kenzie to at least present the case to the coroner. Kenzie answered several phone calls and processed forms. Eventually, she looked across her desk at Zachary.

  “Tell me why you’re doing this, Zachary.”

  “I want to find out what really happened to Robin. If she was murdered…”

  “But why? Tell me it isn’t because you want to get back together with Bridget.”

  Zachary felt like she had sucker-punched him. For a minute, he forgot how to breathe. What could he tell her? Of course he had taken the case because of Bridget. Of course he wanted to get back together with the love of his life. But he couldn’t tell Kenzie that. He didn’t want to risk losing her too. He focused his gaze just below her eyes, so he didn’t have to meet her intense gaze.

  “I want to find out the truth.” His voice sounded strangled in his own ears.

  “Because of Bridget.”

  “Don’t you think Robin deserves justice?”

  She just looked at him. Could everyone read him so clearly? Zachary looked down, blinking, not wanting her to see his desperation.

  “Bridget isn’t coming back, Zachary,” Kenzie said firmly. “She’s playing with your heart. Using your feelings toward her to get you involved in an investigation is really low. Can’t you see how she’s using you?”

  “Robin Salter was murdered,” Zachary said firmly. “She shouldn’t be buried without anybody even knowing that.”

  “What’s all this?” A man’s voice came from behind Zachary. Kenzie looked up, all color draining from her naturally fair complexion. Zachary turned around to see who was there. At first glance, Zachary would have through him just another lab technician. But the name badge on the man’s lab coat gave him away as Dr. Wiltshire, the coroner. He was a clean-shaven older man, the hair on his temples gray, a pair of rectangular reading glasses sliding down his nose. He had a couple of files in his hands and had obviously come out of the lab to give them to Kenzie.

  “It’s nothing,” Kenzie said evenly, giving Zachary a glare that was obviously meant to keep him quiet. But it was his one chance to present the case to Dr. Wiltshire and he wasn’t going to pass it up.

  “It isn’t nothing,” he insisted. “When a woman dies unexpectedly two days after she dumps her boyfriend, don’t you think that is suspicious?”

  Dr. Wiltshire pushed up his glasses and looked at Kenzie. A red flush at her neckline was spreading upward.

  “Tell the whole story,” Kenzie insisted. “Tell him she had terminal cancer and was under a doctor’s care. Her doctor said it was natural causes. That’s why it never came through here.”

  “Doctors can be wrong. Everybody says it was too early. She was expected to live for mon
ths yet. She wasn’t dying. She was still fighting it and it wasn’t her time to go.”

  “It was a doctor-attended death,” Kenzie snapped. “It was his responsibility to report it if he thought there was anything suspicious about the circumstances of her death. People die before they are expected to all the time. They’re not all murdered.”

  “She treated her boyfriend like trash. She kicked him to the curb, and not forty-eight hours later, she was dead.”

  Dr. Wiltshire studied Zachary, head cocked curiously. “Do I know your face? Who are you?”

  Zachary thought he should stand up and introduce himself properly, shaking Dr. Wiltshire’s hand. But he was still so shaky, he didn’t know whether his legs would hold him. Collapsing in the middle of the floor was really not the best way of convincing the coroner that he had logical, reasoned arguments with respect to Robin’s death.

  “My name is Zachary Goldman. I’m a private investigator.”

  “A private investigator. And you were hired to look into this case?”

  Zachary nodded.

  “His ex-wife asked him to look into it,” Kenzie interposed, trying to sway Dr. Wiltshire from thinking that someone had thought the case had enough merit to actually put the money into hiring Zachary to investigate.

  “Ex-wife?” Dr. Wiltshire repeated. “And you took the case?” His opinion had clearly been swayed the wrong direction by Kenzie’s argument. “I wouldn’t take a case from my ex-wife if she was holding a gun to my head!”

  They both laughed at the good-natured joke, but Kenzie’s glare at Zachary was poisonous. She did not appreciate being shown up in front of her boss. Zachary could guess that the next time he wanted her opinion on a case or an explanation of medical terminology, she was not going to be so eager to help.

  “Do we have a file on this case?” Dr. Wiltshire asked Kenzie.

  “No, sir. Like I said, the doctor attending said it was a natural death. She was terminal.”

  “We can’t rule out foul play even if she was dying anyway. The timing was unexpected?”