Kill Switch

by Neal Baer

  “Impossible,” Michael said. “We’re her parents, for Christ’s sake. How would we not know something like that? If that were true, why wouldn’t she tell us?”

  “Frankly, we’d like to know that too,” replied Claire.

  “When was the last time you heard from Tammy?” Nick asked.

  “I spoke to her two days ago,” Gloria replied. “She sounded perfectly okay to me.”

  “And you’re sure she was calling from Hawaii,” said Nick.

  “She couldn’t have been,” Claire said, before the Sorensons could answer. “Tammy’s cancer was advanced to the point where there’s no way she could have made that kind of trip.”

  “I don’t understand,” Michael said. “You’re saying she was so sick, but we saw her just a few weeks ago and she looked absolutely fine.”

  Claire said what came next as gently as she could. “Your daughter had stage-five metastatic disease. Her cancer originated in her immune system and had infiltrated every major organ. I don’t mean to be crass, Mr. and Mrs. Sorenson, but it’s a wonder Tammy could even talk two days ago.”

  Michael Sorenson eyed Claire. “You don’t talk like any police officer I’ve ever spoken to,” he observed, “but you sound exactly like every doctor I know.”

  Claire wasn’t about to lie to these people. “I am a doctor,” she said, covering for Nick. “Detective Lawler asked me to come here tonight to help make sense of all this, and none of it makes any sense at all. Tammy couldn’t have been cancer-free three weeks ago when you saw her, or even mobile, with the severity of cancer the medical examiner found in her.”

  Michael was clearly getting irritated. “My daughter had a life-insurance physical two months ago,” he said, “and she was approved for the policy last week. We both know that never would’ve happened if even a trace of cancer had been found. How do you explain that, Doctor?”

  Claire was absolutely flummoxed by this. “Scientifically, I can’t,” she answered. “I’ve never heard of a tumor that grew so fast.” Then she had a thought. “Can you tell me what your daughter did for a living?”

  “Tammy had a PhD in molecular biology,” Gloria said, starting to cry again. “She worked for a firm called Biopharix up in Cold Spring.”

  “I haven’t heard of them,” Claire replied, “but I’m sure Detective Lawler will be checking them out.”

  “First, though, I’d like to check out your daughter’s bedroom if that’s okay with you,” Nick said.

  “Oh, Tammy never changed the address on her license,” said Michael. “She hasn’t lived here since she left for graduate school.”

  “She has an apartment in White Plains,” Gloria added.

  “Can I have your permission to search the apartment?” asked Nick.

  “I’ll get you the key,” Michael said. “Anything to help you find the person who killed our daughter.”

  He left the room. Gloria’s eyes, though, were on Claire. There was something about her, Gloria thought, something more than just curiosity about Tammy’s cancer. She cared.

  “Please,” Gloria now said to Claire, “when you find something out, you’ll tell us, won’t you? We have to know. She was my little girl.”

  She was my little girl.

  How many times did Amy’s mother say that?

  “I promise that you’ll be kept apprised of every development,” Claire said to her, looking right at Nick to make sure he got the message.

  “When can we get her?” Gloria asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  “You can see her now,” Nick said, “and we’ll release her body as soon as all the toxicology labs come back.”

  Gloria closed her eyes. Just as Amy’s mother had when she saw Claire for the first time after Amy was kidnapped.

  Twenty minutes later, Nick’s gloved hand turned the key in the lock of Tammy Sorenson’s front door. She lived in a pleasant, newly renovated apartment complex just outside downtown White Plains, Westchester County’s seat.

  The conversation during the short ride had been one of stark confusion. Nick and Claire both thought that Tammy Sorenson was the piece of the Todd Quimby puzzle that didn’t fit: She had a PhD, didn’t live in the city, and was terminally ill. Why would Quimby have chosen her?

  “Maybe somehow they knew each other,” Claire suggested. “What if there’s a link between them, somewhere in their past?”

  Nick agreed they couldn’t rule it out. “Tammy looks like Quimby’s other victims,” he said, hypothesizing. “He had to run somewhere after he lost us in the subway. Maybe he called his friend Tammy, came up here to hide out, and when he saw her with the short blond hair, he snapped and murdered her too.”

  “Like he almost did to me,” said Claire.

  “It would explain where he stashed her body for a day—in her own apartment,” said Nick.

  “But not how he got her thirty miles to that softball field in Manhattan,” argued Claire. “Unless he stole a car, or used Tammy’s.”

  Nick knew she was right. He called the Sorensons back, who told them that Tammy drove a dark blue Toyota Camry. But it was parked right outside her apartment complex when they drove up. Somehow Tammy got to the city and Quimby got to her.

  Now, at the apartment, Nick removed the key from the lock. He handed Claire a pair of latex gloves. “If there’s a crime scene in there,” he warned, “you touch nothing unless I tell you to.”

  Nick opened the door and turned on the light. The old parquet floor shone as if it had just been refinished, the paint was fresh, even the couch pillows were perfectly placed.

  Nick gestured for Claire to follow him in. They walked past a tiny, nearly empty galley kitchen and switched on an overhead light.

  And what they saw only deepened the mystery of Tammy Sorenson.

  “It’s too neat,” Nick said. “Like she hasn’t been here in weeks.”

  “Never mind that,” Claire replied. “This doesn’t seem like a lived-in apartment.”

  Right again, Nick realized. It was too perfect. “Furniture looks cookie-cutter. Like it was rented.”

  Claire took a quick look at the numerous photos in frames adorning tables and shelves. Tammy with her parents, her friends, on boats, the beach.

  “I’ll check the bedroom,” offered Claire.

  “No, I’ll do it. Remember what I said.”

  “Yes, touch nothing,” Claire said.

  She stood in place as Nick opened the doors to the bedroom and bathroom and turned on the lights in each. He pulled open the mirror over the sink to reveal the medicine cabinet.

  “If she had cancer, she’d be on medication, right?”

  “Enough to fill a whole pharmacy,” Claire answered.

  “There isn’t one pill bottle in here,” said Nick, stumped, as he closed the medicine cabinet.

  “Unless he cleaned up after himself, Quimby didn’t murder Tammy in this apartment,” he said. “I’m gonna ask the White Plains cops to have their crime scene unit dust this place for prints just to find out if he was ever here.”

  The gloves were starting to bother Claire. “Can I take these off?” she asked.

  “How’re you gonna help me if you do that?”

  “Help you do what?”

  “We didn’t come here just to look around,” Nick told her. “Tammy’s parents are her next of kin. They gave us permission to search the place. And that’s what we’re going to do. You take the bedroom and I’ll look around in here.”

  “What exactly am I looking for?

  “Anything that seems unusual or helpful to us.”

  “And if I find something?”

  “Just shout. But leave everything the way you find it.”

  Claire nodded and stepped into Tammy’s bedroom. But this didn’t look like any woman’s bedroom she’d ever seen. The night tables, dressers, and headboard of the king-sized bed were a dark cherry and cut in sleek, straight, almost masculine lines. The sheets, folded over the neatly positioned bedspread, were white, as were the t
owels in the bathroom.

  “Place looks like a hotel,” she shouted to Nick.

  He stuck his head in the doorway. “Yeah, unless the previous tenant was a guy and she bought his furniture from him when she moved in here.”

  Good point, Claire thought as Nick went back to his search, and she gingerly opened the top drawer of the dresser. It was filled with women’s panties and thongs, haphazardly thrown in instead of being neatly folded. As she opened the other drawers and the closet, Claire found them just as disorganized and totally at odds with the rest of the apartment. And then the psychiatrist in her took over.

  The apartment’s a metaphor for Tammy’s life. All put together on the outside but inside she was a mess.

  She was about to join Nick in the living room when she noticed a strange protrusion in the bedspread about halfway between the floor and the top of the mattress. Thinking maybe she had moved something she shouldn’t have, she tried to smooth it out.

  But it was hard. Like something was poking out.

  “Detective!” she shouted. “I need you in here.”

  Nick was there in seconds.

  “I think there’s something in this bed.”

  He lifted the bedspread. Sure enough, the corner of a small bound book stuck out from under the mattress just enough to cause the odd lump in the fabric. Carefully, Nick had Claire hold up the bedspread as he took a photo with his cell phone. Then he grabbed the book with two gloved fingers and pulled it from its hiding place. It had no title or print of any kind on the spine or front cover. Claire knew instantly what it was.

  “It’s her diary,” she said to Nick.

  “You haven’t even looked at it,” Nick said.

  “I’m a girl,” Claire said with a knowing smile. “Under the mattress is just one of the many favorite places we hide our diaries.”

  “Hide them from who?”

  “Any busybody who’d want to read it. It’s a privacy thing.”

  Nick threw her a look as he opened it. Again, Claire was correct. The smooth white pages bore the curvy, neat handwriting that could only be female.

  He flipped through the pages until he found where Tammy had stopped writing.

  “You ready for this? Her last entry was three weeks ago.”

  “Right around the time her parents say they last saw her,” Claire said.

  “What do you make of this, Dr. Holmes?” he asked, handing the open book to Claire.

  She read the odd entries aloud.

  “Steve and Mark—Red . . . Five.”

  “Frank—Imagine . . . Three.”

  “Jordan—Starlight . . . Five.”

  “Here’s the last one from three weeks ago. Some guy with the initials E.B.—Red . . . Five plus.”

  “Any idea what the hell that means?”

  Claire had a pretty good idea. “I think it’s a sex diary,” she said.

  Nick shook his head. “That something else you girls do?”

  “Of course we do. I can understand why Tammy wrote them down.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “Because from the looks of this, she didn’t have sex with the same man twice.”

  This prompted Nick to look over her shoulder. “You’re right,” he said after a moment. “What are the numbers?” he asked.

  “I think it’s a rating system,” Claire replied.

  “I thought that was a guy thing,” Nick said.

  “Tammy was a scientist, so the attention to detail fits. What I don’t understand are the words: ‘Red, Imagine, Starlight . . .’ ”

  But Nick knew exactly what they were. “Because you’re not from here. Red, Imagine, and Starlight are all nightclubs on the West Side. Three blocks from where we found Tammy.”

  They looked at each other. It was starting to make sense.

  “You think this was her bucket list? Like she knew she was dying and decided she was gonna go out with a bang? No pun intended.”

  And then it hit. Frantically, she began turning pages, speed-reading each one, looking for the name she was almost certain would be there. She had to go back only ten pages before she saw it.

  “Todd—Red . . . Two.”

  “What’s the date on that?” asked Nick.

  “Eight months ago,” Claire answered.

  “That’s right around the time Quimby was arrested,” Nick said.

  “Tammy met him at the club,” Claire realized. “She slept with him because that’s what she did. My guess is, he came back looking for her after he got out of jail and saw her with another guy.”

  Nick knew where she was going. “He stalks her, murders her, keeps her on ice, and dumps her in the ballpark on home plate. To be found when the sun comes up or the lights are turned on. So everyone could see her for what Quimby thought she was.”

  “A whore,” said Claire. “She was just another whore to him.”

  CHAPTER 14

  After Nick dropped Claire off at the safe house, she barely slept, tossing and turning, obsessed with the mystery of Tammy Sorenson. The same question flashed over and over in her mind:

  How could Tammy have been cancer-free two months ago and riddled with metastatic disease now?

  “As far as the murder investigation’s concerned, all we need to know is how she’s connected to Todd Quimby,” Nick had said when she mentioned the cancer to him in the car on the way home from Tammy’s apartment.

  He doesn’t understand. He’s a cop. I’m a doctor. A scientist. And scientifically, the case of Tammy’s sudden onset of lymphoma is an anomaly that must be investigated.

  She considered mentioning it to Dr. Curtin, briefly deluded by the remote possibility her mentor would see the value in getting to the bottom of this medical riddle. Until she came back to reality and realized it would be more like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Curtin had expressly ordered her to steer clear of anything Quimby, an edict she had flagrantly disobeyed. If he found out what she’d been doing, he would surely expel her from the fellowship program, a risk Claire didn’t want to take.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Instead, she decided she’d solve the puzzle herself, and only when all the evidence was in place would she present it to Curtin as a fait accompli.

  First, though, she had to gather the evidence, assuming any could be found. She picked up the phone and called Tammy’s mother.

  “Mrs. Sorenson?” Claire said into the receiver, staring at the blank walls of her interim apartment. “It’s Claire Waters. I was at your house with Detective Lawler last night. . . .”

  “Yes, Doctor,” came the voice of Tammy’s mother, Gloria. “Do you have any information for us?”

  “Not yet,” Claire answered. “But there’s something I’m hoping you can help me with.”

  “Of course. My husband and I will help in any way we can,” Gloria answered.

  “Mr. Sorenson mentioned last night that Tammy had just undergone an insurance physical,” Claire said. “By law, the insurance company is required to send the applicant a copy of the results. Did Tammy ever mention anything about that to you?”

  “She didn’t have to,” Gloria replied. “The results were mailed here to the house and my husband opened them by accident. We actually read them to Tammy over the phone.”

  “Is there any chance you could fax them to me?” Claire asked.

  “Give me the number and I’ll do it right now,” Gloria said.

  Claire could only wonder how Gloria was holding up. No doubt she and her husband were making funeral arrangements for their daughter, something no parent should ever have to do. Which is why Claire hated to push this grieving mother.

  “Mrs. Sorenson, I know this is a horrible shock and I hate to impose, but if it’s okay, there’s one other thing I need your help with.”

  “Please,” Gloria said, “don’t feel in the least like you’re imposing.”

  “Do you happen to know if Tammy had an internist?”

  “Yes, she goes to the same . . . went to the s
ame doctor my husband and I have been seeing for years—Phil Gentry at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla.”

  “Would you be willing to sign a release authorizing Dr. Gentry to provide me with her medical records?”

  Claire could hear the hesitation on the other end of the phone.

  “Is this about the cancer?” Gloria asked.

  She was not about to lie to this poor woman. “Yes, it is,” Claire replied.

  “And you think her being sick has something to do with her murder?”

  Claire had to be careful here, because not even Nick knew what she was doing.

  “We just have to cover all the bases,” she said evenly. “It’s routine in a case like this.”

  Routine in an unexplained, sudden case of rare, aggressive, metastatic Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Claire thought, justifying the ruse to herself.

  “I’m sure if you call Phil and explain why you need Tammy’s records, he’d be glad to give them to you,” said Gloria.

  The last thing Claire wanted was another doctor asking questions about what the records were really for. Fortunately, she had an out.

  “The federal privacy laws regarding medical records are very strict, even after a patient’s death,” she said to Gloria, “and if I called Dr. Gentry, he’d ask me to come to you first for permission, which is why I’m doing that now. Believe me, the last thing I want is to disturb you at a time like this.”

  “All right,” said Gloria. “If you fax me the release, I’ll take care of it.”

  Claire felt a twinge of guilt. A lie was a lie, no matter how little and white and necessary it seemed, and she wasn’t done yet.

  “I can’t thank you enough, Mrs. Sorenson. Is there anything else I can do to help you and your husband? You were able to recover Tammy from the medical examiner with no problem?”

  Claire had asked that question for a specific reason.

  “Yes, the funeral home picked her up this morning,” Gloria said, sounding empty.

  “Can you tell me when the service is?” Claire asked. “Detective Lawler will want to know.” At least that wasn’t a lie, Claire thought, knowing full well homicide detectives routinely attended their victims’ funerals to see who showed up in case one of the mourners turned out to be the killer. She also knew Nick would be attending for sure.