by Lucy Kerr
He considered it, ushering me inside the elevator. “Costello thinks he’s king of the ER. The man’s convinced he doesn’t answer to anybody, including the administration. He’d assume he dealt with you, and that was the end of it.”
As much as I hated to admit it, that did sound more like Costello’s style—abrasive arrogance, not slithering behind the scenes. “If that’s the case, where’s Strack getting his information? Someone complained about me. He even knew that I’d been in Clem’s room on Saturday night. He mentioned it the first time he called me into his office.”
“Wasn’t me,” Marcus said, pressing the buttons for our respective floors. “Strack was there when I talked to Legal, and he already knew you were in the room. He asked me about it.”
“I wasn’t accusing you,” I assured him. “Did you see Costello on the floor that night?”
Marcus shook his head. “He never leaves the ER when he’s on duty. Besides, every doctor on call that night was downstairs, helping with the bus crash. Cardiac was a ghost town. I didn’t even realize you’d left.”
I chuckled. “It’s a good thing you came in to wake me. If I’d missed Charlie’s C-section, Strack would be the least of my problems.”
“What are you talking about?” Marcus said. “I didn’t wake you up.”
“Well, somebody did, and I owe them.” I paused. “I can’t really blame them for telling Strack, either. They were looking out for their patient.”
“Mr. Jensen was my patient,” Marcus said slowly. The elevator doors opened, but he made no move to leave. “We’ve got fourteen beds, and everybody has their own cases, unless there’s a code. Nobody else worked with him that night. I would have seen it in the chart.”
The elevator doors began to slide shut, but I mashed the “door open” button and stared at him. “Someone came in that room while I was sleeping. The door woke me, and I heard footsteps. I even asked about Clem’s medications.”
“You didn’t ask me anything,” he said. “And I was the only staff member in the room that night. I checked his vitals five minutes before you showed up. The next time I went in, you were gone.”
“Then who woke me up?”
Marcus scowled. “Someone who wasn’t supposed to be there.”
TWELVE
Clem’s mystery visitor continued to gnaw at me. I’d been a foot away from the killer. If I’d been a little more alert, I could have identified him. I could have saved Clem’s life—a second time. The instincts I relied on so heavily had let me down.
Unfortunately, I had plenty of time to mull over where I’d gone wrong. As soon as I’d mentioned having Laura and her son for dinner, my mother went into party-prep mode—which is how I’d ended up covering the store the next morning, while my mother arranged everything for the impromptu party that night.
“I haven’t done this in more than ten years,” I pointed out as I poured a travel mug of coffee.
“It’s like riding a bike,” my mom said, trying to smooth down my hair. “You never forget. You might even enjoy it.”
Before I could tell her how unlikely that was, she added, “And it will be good for people to see you out and about. Show them you have a clean conscience.”
“I do have a clean conscience.” As regarded Clem, at least. My engagement was a different matter entirely.
“Even better,” she said and shoved me out the door.
Which is how I found myself behind the back counter of Stapleton and Sons, exactly as I’d never wanted.
My mom was right, at least in one respect. Not much had changed. The contractors were surprised to see me behind the counter, but when I asked them about Clem, they had little to say. “Kept to himself lately,” one of them told me. “Seemed happy enough, though.”
Once the early morning rush was out of the way, I settled into the familiar rhythms: restocking shelves, answering the occasional phone call. But just as Charlie’s books had shown, business was slow. I tried chalking it up as a typical weekday, but if the dearth of customers was typical, Charlie was really in trouble. The bell over the front door jingled, and I practically leapt over the counter in greeting.
“Marcus?” His bulk took up the entire aisle, shoulders brushing against a display of paint chips.
“I need a rake.” He looked around furtively and headed toward the back counter.
“Sure. They’re in the next room.” I pointed, adding, “Left hand side, by the garden supplies.”
He ignored me and continued to the back counter. “Sounds good.”
“You want me to choose a rake for you?”
He frowned. “Or a hammer. Better make it a hammer.”
“Okay.” I grabbed a standard twenty-inch hammer from the hand tools aisle before joining him. “They do different things, you know. They’re not interchangeable.”
He gave me a wry smile. “You’re good people, Frankie. The way you tried to help Mr. Jensen. The way you stuck up for Meg Costello. Not everyone would.”
“Thanks.”
“There was someone else in Mr. Jensen’s room that night,” he said, pulling out his wallet.
“There was,” I agreed, a cautious hope taking root inside me.
“Doesn’t smell right, does it? Especially now they’re trying to pin his death on you.”
I shook my head, counted back his change.
He weighed the coins and bills resting in his massive palm. Then he shrugged and pulled a sheaf of papers from inside his coat. “Here you go.”
“Clem’s chart?” I said hoarsely. “You said . . .”
“He was my patient. Can’t just let it go.”
I clutched the papers. “Marcus—”
“I can’t do much else,” he warned. “Probably best if we aren’t seen talking again, especially not at the hospital. Hope this gives you a start, anyway.”
“It’s more than a start,” I said. “It’s huge. Thank you.”
“Glad we didn’t go with the rake.” He picked up the bag with the hammer and grinned widely. “I’ve got two days off. Wouldn’t want to spend them doing yard work.”
* * *
Charlie’s loss of customers was my gain. I spent the rest of the morning going over Clem’s chart: a minutely detailed record of every test and procedure he’d undergone, every reading of his vitals, every medication he’d taken during his brief stay at the hospital. I flipped to the last page and felt a rush of gratitude—Marcus had even managed to get me a copy of Clem’s postmortem report.
The findings were consistent with what I’d been told. Clem had gone into respiratory arrest, then cardiac failure. Essentially, his lungs had stopped working, and the lack of oxygen had triggered a second, fatal heart attack.
The medical examiner, however, hadn’t explained why he’d gone into respiratory arrest. In his opinion, the cause of death was consistent with Clem’s general health and history of heart trouble—his lungs had likely been damaged during the heart attack and couldn’t bear up under the strain. Multiple organ dysfunction, they called it.
Most of the time, medical examiners find what they’re looking for; they’re confirming a cause of death, and it’s human nature to see what they expect. In a case like Clem’s, for example, the ME expected he would find cardiac failure, so he did. The fact that Clem was supposed to be medicating for those exact problems didn’t faze him. He assumed, as Marcus had, that his blood work showed noncompliance, regardless of Laura’s insistence otherwise.
Nobody looked for answers to questions they didn’t think of. Nobody looked for clues to a murder that hadn’t happened.
Except me.
I tried to think it through logically. Noah had wanted proof. Was this enough?
I had Clem’s declaration that his heart attack wasn’t an accident—but the hospital would argue he was delusional, which is why Costello had given him the lorazepam.
I had blood work that showed he wasn’t taking his meds, despite Laura’s insistence otherwise, which bolstered Strack’s
case.
I had the report on Clem’s surgery: Dr. Hardy and his team had successfully busted the clot and inserted a stent. According to the ME, Clem’s primary cause of death was respiratory arrest—the heart attack was secondary.
I rubbed the back of my neck, reading through the report again, trying to figure out what was bothering me. The cardiac team had responded swiftly: Marcus had called a code within seconds of the alarms sounding, and the crash team responded instantaneously. Yet it had been too late. Clem’s vitals had plummeted too quickly for their efforts to make any real difference.
He’d been gone before they got there.
“Excuse me?”
I glanced up, shoving the papers behind the counter. A frazzled young woman, baby on her hip and circles under her eyes, stood before me.
“Sorry! I didn’t hear the bell. Can I help you?”
“I hope so. My basement’s flooding.”
“Oh,” I groaned. “That’s the worst. Did the sump pump fail?”
Because Stillwater was located on the river, every house with a basement also had a sump pump—designed to carry water to the street instead of allowing it to flood the basement. The woman nodded. “We just replaced it last summer.”
My heart sank. “With one of ours?”
The last thing Charlie needed was to be held liable for a flooded basement or to develop a reputation for shoddy merchandise.
She shook her head, her cheeks turning pink. “The HouseMasters out on the interstate.”
I hadn’t realized there was a HouseMasters—a big-box hardware store—anywhere nearby. Suddenly Charlie’s books made a lot more sense.
“What did your plumber say?”
“We’re looking for a new plumber,” she said. “But I don’t understand what happened. It was a new pump. I’ve heard it run. Why wouldn’t it work?”
“Well, it’s new, so it probably wasn’t the battery. I would guess there’s something wrong with the sensor switch. If that’s not triggered, the pump won’t kick in, and you won’t know it’s flooded until you see the standing water.”
“I’m seeing plenty of it now,” she muttered. “Any recommendations for a plumber?”
“Sure,” I said. As always, we kept a red binder underneath the register with a list of trusted contractors and service people. It was not a particularly long list, but I noticed Clem’s name was on there, in my mom’s small, precise script.
That was all the character reference I needed.
“Here you go,” I said, handing her a piece of paper with several plumbers’ numbers on it. “Let me know when you’re ready to order that pump—we’ll remind the plumber to make sure the sensor’s calibrated properly.”
The words reverberated in my head, tolling like a bell. As soon as she left, I snatched up Clem’s chart again.
A cardiac patient—especially one just out of surgery—would be under continuous monitoring. Remote telemetry, we called it. A real-time readout of his pulse, respiration, and heart rhythms were sent to a wall of monitors at the nurses’ station. If his vitals dropped, alarms would sound both in the room and at the main desk, alerting the crash team.
But you could lower the threshold, set the monitors not to trigger an alarm until a patient’s vitals were dangerously low. The killer could have recalibrated Clem’s monitors, buying themselves time and privacy.
Even so, most monitors had a failsafe—a built-in minimum that would trigger the alarm, even if the settings were tampered with. The alarm should have sounded, giving Marcus and his team enough time to respond.
Assuming, that is, they’d heard the alarm. It was possible to turn off the sound on a monitor, no matter what the readings were. We did it all the time for terminal patients who were gradually slipping away, so that the noise wouldn’t intrude upon a grieving family’s last moments together. You could turn it off at the nurse’s station as well. It would be easy to overlook, especially in the chaos of a shift change.
Vitals dropped off a cliff, no warning, Marcus had said. It would have seemed so, to the team: Clem been fine during a vitals check, twenty minutes before; by the time the alarms sounded, his respiration and heart rate had bottomed out. But when I checked the records more closely, zeroing in on those twenty minutes, it didn’t look like a jagged falling off of air and blood. Clem had sunk, quickly and smoothly, like a stone dropped into deep water.
I studied Clem’s pulse ox measurements—the amount of oxygen in his bloodstream. Seven minutes before the alarm sounded, his numbers started falling. Even the efforts of the crash team hadn’t reversed them. My throat grew tight at the realization.
The ME was partially right. Clem had suffered respiratory failure, but not a sudden one. It had taken long, agonizing minutes. Had he realized what was happening as he suffocated to death? I hoped, for his sake, that he’d lost consciousness first, that he hadn’t been afraid or in pain. I hoped the killer had granted him that small mercy.
Because there was a killer. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that Clem had been murdered. Now I needed to figure out how. Tampering with the monitors had hidden the crime, but the killer would have needed a way to cut off Clem’s air. Marcus would have noticed if Clem’s O2 line had been tampered with, and a pillow over Clem’s face would have been noted in the postmortem.
Which left drugs.
Plenty of poisons could cause organ failure, but the medical examiner would only screen for poison if he’d thought Clem’s death was suspicious—which he hadn’t. At this point, the only way to check would be to perform a second, more thorough, autopsy. And the ME would only do that if someone—the police or the family—requested it.
All I had to do was figure out a way to ask Laura.
THIRTEEN
Telling someone their father was murdered is a poor way to start off dinner conversation. You can’t exactly introduce the topic while asking a guest to pass the green beans. Even dessert won’t soften the blow. So even though I wanted, desperately, to tell Laura the truth about her father’s death, I forced myself to make small talk while we ate.
Riley and CJ regarded each other warily until they found common ground in their hatred of the hot lunch program. When he wasn’t bemoaning the rubbery rectangles that passed as school pizza, CJ was quiet. He was a small-boned kid with thin, pale cheeks and neatly combed brown hair. Already soft-spoken, he had a habit of lapsing into silence, dark-brown eyes straying to the framed picture of Charlie and me, perched on the railing of Stapleton and Son’s front porch, my dad standing behind us with his arms wrapped around our shoulders. Thinking of Clem, no doubt.
“My grandma made brownies,” I overheard Riley confide as they carried their plates to the kitchen. “I helped. They’re extra chocolate-y.”
“I don’t have a grandma,” CJ said. “I don’t have a grandpa anymore, either. He died.”
“My grandpa died too, but it was a long time ago. I wasn’t even born. Was yours fun?”
“Yeah,” he said. “He taught me how to fish. He even taught me how to get the guts out, and get the scales off, after you caught one.”
If he’d hoped to gross Riley out, he’d told the wrong girl. “Coooool,” she said, eyes widening. Pride swelled within me.
“I insist,” my mother said from the dining room. “I made too much, and there’s barely room in the refrigerator.”
“But—” Laura protested. “I’m sure you could—”
“Take the lasagna,” my mother said firmly, and Laura must have recognized the futility of arguing. Mom had planned to send them home with food all along, and I was beginning to suspect she was sneakier than I’d realized.
“Thank you,” Laura said eventually. “And you’re sure you don’t mind watching CJ?”
“Of course,” she replied. “He’ll be good company for Riley. Go on,” she said, shooing us out the door.
“Your family seems nice,” Laura said as we drove along the dark rural roads. Clem lived on the other side of the Illinois River, o
n the outskirts of Dover Creek, a town too small to properly be called a town.
“They can be,” I said and instantly felt ashamed, complaining about my mom when Laura was going to bury her father soon. “It feels strange to be living at home again.”
“I bet,” Laura smiled. “Where are you sleeping?”
I made a face. “I’m bunking with Riley. She snores, but it’s only a temporary arrangement.”
She nodded and mercifully didn’t ask about how long I was staying.
“I’m surprised your mom lives with your sister and her family.”
I shrugged. “We grew up in that house, so my mom was already living there. I don’t know how they make it work, but they do.”
“It’s nice,” she said. “My dad’s lived alone since my mom died. I called him every morning, and he stopped by to play with CJ most days, too. But Jimmy would never have let him live with us.”
“How long did you say it was since you and he split up?”
“Three years,” she said. “He’s in and out. He’ll go weeks without seeing CJ, sometimes more. I wish he’d move away permanently, but he’s like one of those bad pennies, always turning up.”
Cornfields flashed by the car, endless rows of dried stalks like a gaunt, ghostly forest, leaves shifting with the restless wind.
“Does Jimmy have a criminal record?” I tried not to sound too eager, but Jimmy was the closest thing I had to a suspect.
She slowed to turn onto the road that ran alongside the river. In the moonlight, the current churned, dark and glinting. “I don’t know. I try to have as little to do with him as possible.”
“Sounds like a good policy.”
“I really appreciate this,” Laura said softly. “CJ doesn’t even want to go to the house. He said it makes him too sad. It makes me too sad.”
“I’m glad I can help.” Guilt wormed its way through my stomach, making me regret the lasagna I’d eaten.
We rode in silence the rest of the way, bumping down increasingly uneven, increasingly dark roads, until she turned down a dirt path. A moment later, the headlights lit on a tidy-looking cabin tucked in a clearing. A homemade wooden swing hung suspended from the branch of a massive oak tree, creaking gently, and the tires crunched on the gravel drive. Laura parked in a patch of grass beside a small barn.
