The Peace Haven Murders

by M. Glenn Graves

  “No,” she said.

  61

  I called my mother’s doctor using the doctor’s private cell number after Rosey and I had listened to Rachel and Sarah tell us over and over of their early morning ordeal with Henry. It was certainly a dramatic encounter and Sarah’s version was much more detailed than Mother’s. Despite the fact that Sarah was the one threatened by Henry, she had a better recollection of the events, or so it seemed to Rosey and me. My mother focused largely upon the bare facts in her three tellings while Sarah offered side commentary to embellish the desperate details. I discerned by reading between her lines that my mother was not enamored with the possibility that she might have had to kill a man. It is a sobering truth that has often surfaced in my life as well. Solving ghastly murders is one thing in my profession. Facing the too-frequently occurring situation of having to shoot someone is an altogether different animal for me.

  “Dr. Jones-McCann speaking, may I help you?” the voice on the other end of the phone said.

  “Clancy, here, Doc. I need some information.”

  “I have a minute or two. Go ahead.”

  “If I were planning to kill someone with a prescription medication and my choices are insulin, B-12, and potassium, which one would I choose?”

  “I don’t like the question.”

  “Granted. But do humor me. There is a method in the madness.”

  “No question. Potassium. Too much of it stops the whole system. Shuts down everything.”

  “How much?”

  “Depends on a lot of factors.”

  “What if I wanted to be certain it would do the job?”

  “As in overkill?”

  “Well said, Doc. Yes, to make sure that the person died from the dosage.”

  “One would use potassium in a concentrated form.”

  “If I injected it into the person, how long would it take?”

  “Minutes. But again, it depends upon the health of the person being injected. But, I would fathom an educated guess to be 25 cc’s. That should be more than enough to shut down the average human. You on to something?”

  “Yes, I am. I think I know how the good preacher died.”

  “What good preacher?”

  “Robert Lee Rowland.”

  “Hadn’t heard this. When did he die?”

  “Sometime early this morning.”

  “Was he in Peace Haven?”

  “No. He was home. Died shortly after breakfast while reading a magazine.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a typical murder that you would involve yourself in, Clancy.”

  “Doesn’t, does it?”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “You his doctor?”

  “No. I heard through the grapevine that he didn’t trust female doctors, so I was definitely out of the loop for him. Just curious, that’s all.”

  “Well, the truth is, Doc, I have no idea what killed him. I am spinning some theories, nothing more. There was no visible sign of any dastardly foul play, so I am looking into other means of getting rid of one’s enemies.”

  “Suspects?”

  “Several. I didn’t like him much myself, but I did not do the deed. There are several suspects, even when I eliminate myself. Someone else beat me to it.”

  “Would you have done the deed otherwise?”

  “Good question, Doc. That’s a really good question.”

  62

  Rosey and I drove over to the Peace Haven home after stopping to drop Sam off at Mother’s house. She seemed genuinely happy to see him, if it was possible for my mother to show genuine happiness. It was not a trait I looked for in her. Maybe she was just glad to be alive. That would fit.

  “Do you think Nurse Ratched will be happy to see you?” Rosey said.

  “As much as ever,” I said.

  “When did the light bulb come one for you?” he asked.

  “Well, believe it or not, it was Robby’s question to me. As I was answering it, it all came together. At least the part about who killed Preacher Rowland and who was behind the murders at Peace Haven.”

  “You mean besides Preacher Rowland.”

  “I do. It was all his idea, his plan, his plotting, his revenge. He just had enough people under his control to pull it off.”

  “He almost got them all,” Rosey said.

  “Yeah, I know. Too many people died.”

  “But you’re still not going to tell me what you figured out?”

  I had him curious and I liked the position he was in. It wasn’t often that I could stay a jump ahead of this man, my friend, Mr. Roosevelt Washington. But, I would enjoy this for a while and try to make it last a little longer.

  “Some things you just have to figure out for yourself.”

  I thought I detected the slight curving of a smile at the corner of his mouth, but I could have been mistaken.

  “I’m hurt that you can’t confide in me something of this nature.”

  “Get over it.”

  He parked the Jag in front of the building and we entered. It was close to mid-day on a Saturday. The place was buzzing with visitors, if it ever could be said to be buzzing. We walked through the maze of wheelchair patients being pushed around the entrance hall by visiting friends and family members. There were patients using walkers with family or friends offering assistance. There were some who were shuffling along on their own, alone, no one visiting with them. They had come to the lobby out of curiosity or some need to be in the midst of the crowd. Maybe they were hoping to conquer the loneliness the institution offered them. I noticed that the visitors were mostly women, but there was a spattering of men in the mixture.

  Rosey and I meandered our way through the web of people and arrived at the nurse’s station at the hub of the main lobby. From there the building spread out in four different directions much like a sprocket with its four spokes.

  “Nurse Ratched?” I said to the first person who actually looked at me. She was seated at a portion of the round desk. Her name tag read Eileen Biggs. Eileen appeared to be in her early thirties and was already establishing herself in the proud tradition of Nurse Ratched. Somehow in the transition from human being to worker at a nursing care facility, she had lost both pleasantness and friendliness. Smiling was simply out of the question.

  “Who?” she said as my interruption of her busyness was stopping the world from turning that exact moment.

  “Nurse Ratched,” I said again, hoping my humor would win the day for Eileen.

  “We have no one by that name here. You have the wrong facility. Do you have a patient here you wish to see?”

  I looked at Rosey who was simply amused that I had taken my humor this far with an obviously unwilling participant. Eileen was an established woman of significant proportions and she appeared to be the kind who did not suffer fools gladly. It was blatantly obvious that I was going to lose in this attempt to get her to smile or display any sort of helpful personality traits. Eileen was a rock. A real trooper. Held her ground with the force and magnitude of a bull elephant. Humorless.

  I smiled and finally acquiesced. Eileen was now looking at me through eyes of steel and absolutely no hint of a smile.

  “Beg your pardon,” I said, “I had the wrong name. The person I’m looking for is named Evelyn Guinn.”

  “Oh. Well, yes, Mrs. Guinn does work here, of course. She’s my supervisor. What’s the nature of your business?” she asked unpleasantly.

  “The nature of my business is with Nurse Guinn,” I smiled broadly at her.

  “I will need to know why you want to see her because she will want to know why you want to talk with her when I talk with her.” She actually said that with a straight face.

  “Tell her it’s a matter of life and death.”

  “It usually is,” she muttered as she waddled off in search of the great one.

  Within minutes Eileen and Evelyn were walking towards us, bookends of a troubled disposition. The singular difference between these two dispassionat
e people was that Nurse Ratched was half the size of Eileen. Bull elephant, baby elephant.

  “Whataya need?” Nurse Ratched said in her usual abrupt tone.

  “Fine, thank you. And you?” I said.

  “Okay, okay. Look, I’m busy here. You see all these people? This is a serious job and I take my work seriously.”

  “Do tell. Believe it or not, Nurse Guinn, I actually take my work seriously as well.”

  “And what work would that be?”

  “I find murderers and stop them from killing. Preferably before they have a chance to kill again and again.”

  “You a cop or something?”

  “Or something. I’m an investigator, a private one.”

  “And why are you telling me all this?”

  “You have a murderer on your staff.”

  “Are you joking with me now?”

  “Not in the slightest. Can we go someplace and talk privately?”

  “Follow me,” she said and headed quickly off in the direction from which she had come.

  Rosey and I followed her keeping to the brisk pace she set. Her office was down a hallway in which there were no rooms for the residents. There were people walking along, up and down, walkers and wheelchairs, just like in the other halls of the facility.

  The sign on the door which she unlocked read “Evelyn Guinn, Head Administrative Nurse.” We followed her into the office. Rosey closed the door behind us.

  “Now, tell me what all of this is about.”

  I explained to her all that had happened and what we had learned in the last twenty four hours. I told her who I suspected of killing the patients.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said.

  “I’m not really here to convince you of this. I simply need to know if she had access to your medical supplies.”

  “No, absolutely not. There is no way she could have gotten into those locked closets and locked cabinets inside of those closets. Impossible,” she said it so emphatically that I was almost willing to believe that I had made a mistake.

  “Who has the keys?”

  “I do.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “The Duty Nurse has a set of those keys.”

  “I assume that you keep your set with you.”

  “I do. All the time. Never leaves me. Never.”

  “And the set for the Duty Nurse?” I asked.

  “That set is hidden by the assignment roster at the central station for nurses.”

  “How many duty nurses are there?”

  “Four.”

  “And you trust them all,” I said.

  “Of course I trust them all. They wouldn’t be duty nurses if I didn’t.”

  “And no one has reported the keys missing at any time in the last several months?”

  Evidently my question hit something that had been absent from our discussion so far. Her answer to my question was not as forth coming as her other answers. She had this look of sudden awareness that seemed to strike her across the bow. She was defeated by the ever-vigilant ace detective doing her job of asking relentless, probing questions.

  “Oh, my,” she said in a quiet tone. “Nurse Ingram came to me late one afternoon back … when was that? … February? It could have been that long ago…Anyway, she came to tell me that she could not find the keys to the medical supplies. But they turned up the next morning, back in the spot where they were supposed to be. I never thought anymore about it.”

  “So they were missing for some twelve hours, give or take?”

  “Could have been twelve hours,” she said.

  “And you probably did an inventory of the supplies the next day?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “If the keys were missing on a Friday afternoon, say, is it likely that there would have been no inventory taken the next day?”

  “No. Not until Monday morning,” she said.

  “So, the normal procedure would be to have an inventory the Monday following the missing keys?”

  “Not likely. Things go into high gear every Monday. It was probably overlooked. Can you tell me what was taken?”

  “Don’t know yet. We’re still waiting on lab tests to determine what type of poison was injected into the patients who died here. But there would have been a number of syringes.”

  “We use a lot of syringes here,” she said. “It is difficult to keep an accurate count of those things. We do the best we can, you understand. But we absolutely do not keep any type of poisons in our medical supplies.”

  “True, but you do keep some drugs that if given in a large enough dosage would act as poisons.”

  She nodded reluctantly to my point, “Yes, that’s true.”

  I looked at Rosey and he shrugged.

  “Is she working today?”

  Nurse Guinn shifted some papers around on her desk apparently looking for a schedule. After moving several files and shifting papers from one side to the other, she finally found a document that gave her the answer.

  “Let me see … yes, this is her weekend to work. She’s supposed to be here today. You want me to call her in?”

  “Do you ever call her to come see you?”

  “No, I don’t usually call her into my office. I go looking for her.”

  “Then we’ll go looking for her,” I said.

  63

  My cell phone rang. It was Rogers. I had called her earlier in the day to update her on all that had happened since our last conversation.

  “The lab found traces of morphine from the broken syringe needle you sent them,” Rogers began. “And just so you will know, I’ve been doing a little checking into morphine and discovered that in some cases it only takes about 50 mg of the drug to head a body towards death. It’s considered a lethal dosage. For some folks, it does not require that many milligrams. Sometimes twenty-five to thirty would do the trick.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I did tell, and this is one of those ever-elusive clues you live for, right?”

  “No doubt.”

  “Proves murder?” Rogers asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “So you now know who the bad guy is?”

  “I’m en route to the bad guy as we speak.”

  “By Jag?”

  “No, by foot.”

  “What happened to the Jag?”

  “Nothing. Rosey and I are inside the Peace Haven facility. Jag won’t fit in here.”

  “A vain attempt at humor, love? So you knew who did it before I called you. You didn’t need this information.” She actually sounded disappointed.

  “I need every piece of data you can discover.”

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  “Verification, love,” I said. “We now have something to compare to other evidence which has come to our attention in the last day or so. If it matches, it puts our suspect in a very bad light.”

  “As usual, you understate this light of guilt for your suspect,” she said.

  “Just hedging my bets or refraining from counting my chickens.”

  “I get the betting metaphor, but I don’t understand the chickens.”

  “My way of saying that there’s several folks complicit in this mess.”

  “Lot of guilt going around,” Rogers said.

  “With surprises,” I said.

  “Oh, goodie. The case is nearly over and you can come home.”

  “Close. I should be home in another day or so. There are some loose ends to tie up, but it’s just about finished.”

  “You can even bring the canine back, if you like. I actually miss you both.”

  “Nice to be missed. And Sam will be thrilled that you want him to come home.”

  I spotted the door to a closet open and I nudged Rosey and pointed in the direction of the closet just ahead of us.

  “Signing out,” I said and closed the phone.

  “Good news?” Rosey asked.

  “Evidence. The lab found traces of morphine on the broken syringe nee
dle.”

  “Proof enough?”

  “Some verification needed,” I said.

  No one was in the closet. We moved on.

  I dialed the number I had entered into my cell phone for Dr. J. Miles Sinclair, the attending physician for J.R. Blair. He had given me his cell phone number after I had told him that this was a murder investigation. He said he was more than willing to help.

  “Miles here,” he answered.

  “Doctor, this is Clancy Evans. I’m the one investigating Blair’s suspicious death. One question. Did you have J.R. Blair on any dosage of morphine for pain management or any other reason?”

  “Let me check. I have some patients on that,” he said.

  I waited while he apparently flipped through some files. It only took him a minute or so to find whatever it was he needed to answer my question.

  “No. J.R. Blair was a healthy man in many ways. But morphine was not one of his medicines.”

  I thanked him and closed the phone.

  “We have evidence,” I said to Rosey. “Now all we need is a smoking gun.”

  After two unsuccessful excursions down two different wings of the complex, Rosey and I finally discovered another open supply closet door. We moved to the side of the hallway of the opened door and approached it cautiously. Rosey was ahead of me, so he was the first to peer inside. No one was there. The cleaning cart was stationed in the middle of the hallway. We could see no one in the area attending to it.

  “I’ll check the rooms on this side,” Rosey whispered and pointed.

  “Ditto over here.”

  We each began to check out the rooms on our chosen side of the hall. A short, fat woman emerged from a room two doors down on my side of the hallway. I didn’t recognize her.

  “We’re looking for Joy,” I said as we joined her at the cleaning cart.

  “She’s not doin’ this wing,” she said.

  “Which wing then?” I asked.

  “I don’t rightly know. Lettme check my schedule,” she answered reluctantly and removed a clipboard which was hanging on the side of the cleaning cart. “She’s over in the west wing today.”