by LS Sygnet
"Speaking of moron doctors, it seems yours hasn't managed to make you bald," I grumbled without much tact considering what Maya was going through in chemotherapy. "You look gorgeous, dammit."
She grinned. "You ought to reconsider this notion of shoving away the helping hand. Ken's has made a world of difference for me."
Johnny was in the foyer with Billy. I lowered my voice. "Tell me what you learned. I haven't told Johnny everything I suspect, Maya, but Riley Storm's handling of Southerby's autopsy could be a critical clue in this case."
"You're not gonna believe this, Helen. Storm actually was once a competent medical examiner."
"Really? Did you find something else on Southerby's case? Did Storm suppress what he really learned?"
She shook her head. "But what I did find was a drastic change in his dedication to performing thorough postmortem examinations. Guess who the first in a long line of sloppy work was?"
"Mitch Southerby."
"Oh, it's better than that, Helen."
"Who was it?" I was certain that Southerby's death had to be the critical missing piece that covered the link to Datello.
"Harry McNamara."
"The former chief of detectives?"
She nodded. "I brought several autopsy reports with me that Riley personally performed, both before and after McNamara's death. It's obvious, Helen. We went from several pages that demonstrated a search for cause of death to McNamara and just about every other exam he performed thereafter that were one page at best. Some didn't rate more than a paragraph that listed height, weight, identifying marks and a rubber-stamped cause of death."
"Heart failure. We've talked about this before. Do you think it was Harry McNamara that was keeping Riley in line?"
"I have no idea. What I find even more incredible is that nobody complained about the sharp drop in quality from the ME's office. I've been here a year, Helen. If this case had happened last Christmas, we'd be talking about work that Riley Storm would provide for the investigation."
"Heart failure generally isn't considered murder. This is strange. How much does Billy know?"
"All of it. Does that matter?"
I shook my head. "I thought maybe if there were details that we could hold back, just for a little while. I feel like I'm close, really close to figuring something out. It's on the tip of my brain and I can't seem to pull it together."
"Novel idea. Maybe talking to Johnny about what's got you stumped will help. Oh, Helen, I wish you'd open your eyes and see what this is doing to him."
"To him? Like I give a damn. He's free to come and go as he pleases. I wasn't exaggerating, Maya. He is literally holding me captive in my own home."
"Johnny would give you anything, Helen. All you have to do is ask."
I gripped her hand. "You need to understand something, Maya. I cannot stay here. Yes, I rebuilt this house and I spent a lot of time... wasted time decorating it. But it's an investment, nothing more. I don't intend to be here permanently."
"Don't say that. We need you here."
"I came for a specific purpose. When that's done, I'm gone."
Orion coughed softly. "You told her, didn't you?"
Maya's chin took a guilty dip.
"Helen, everything I'm doing is so when you are ready to leave, you don't go in a pine box. Ned, Devlin and Crevan are here. Zack called and said he'll be ten minutes late. Maybe we should get started."
"Helen," Maya whispered, "why can't you see how much he loves you?"
"Love," I spat. "There is no such thing. Only strings. Forgive me, but I don't need that ever again."
Johnny brought two more pain pills and a steaming mug of something that smelled like creamy tea and nutmeg. "Drink it," he ordered.
I hated that his pain pills worked better than my oxycontin. I hated that his hot beverages tasted so good and settled my stomach and even stimulated my appetite. It annoyed me to watch him putter around my kitchen making breakfast and thoughtfully sliced apples with chunky peanut butter. The cups of cocoa and hot tea and scrambled eggs – they screamed words at me that he hadn't said in so long, but I heard them just the same.
Johnny's infamous point of no return. His promise not to leave me, no matter what. I hated him for meaning it.
"Mmm," Maya sniffed at my mug. "Chai. Johnny, isn't that stuff made with black tea? It's loaded with caffeine."
"This blend is made with Sleepy Time," he grinned. "She'll be ready for a hot bath and a good night's sleep in about an hour, I'd say."
Zack arrived before the banter over Johnny's wonderful bedside manner abated. I wanted to kiss Zack's feet for sparing me hearing it another second.
"Did you find anything out about what Ireland was specifically investigating?"
He stared.
"Zack."
His head shook. "Sorry... I was... uh..."
"For God's sake. I lost eight pounds. Can we please discuss this case before Journey Ireland dies of old age?"
Devlin slouched beside me on the sofa. "I'm all for it. Something happened at the hospital this afternoon. I don't know how related it is to the case, but..."
I grinned at him. "All details are important, right?"
"I'm a quick study, Helen." He glanced around at the spectators to our easy camaraderie. "She got a certified letter from a messenger this afternoon. Her mother's finances are completely depleted. It took awhile to coax it out of her, but apparently she's been stressed about this coming for a few months, and last week, she even met with a realtor to talk about putting the family home on the market."
I gripped Devlin's arm. "Did she do it? Put the house up for sale, I mean."
He shook his head. "That's the thing for her. She's having a hard time letting go of it, Helen."
"Not related to the case my ass," I shot off the sofa and started pacing. "I wonder what that son of a bitch said to her yesterday."
"Helen, what are you thinking?" Maya asked. "Granted I'm not up to speed on everything that's going on, but it's not rocket science that you think the attempt on her life is related to what happened to her father."
I looked a Zack. "What did you find out about David Ireland's cases today, Zack? Was there anything remotely related to Datello in the cases he was prosecuting?"
"David wasn't working in the trial law division. He prosecuted cases relating to fraud. At the time, he had a couple of corporate cases dealing with embezzlement and a whole slew of mail and credit card fraud cases. There was nothing that at least superficially related to Danny Datello."
"Did the DA's office hang onto his files?" Johnny asked.
"Sure. I figured you'd want to have a look at them, so I packed up the boxes out of our basement storage center and brought them over. Mind you, there aren't any files from his cases – at least not the official files. After he died, all his active cases were reassigned. What was stored were his personal notes."
"That's even better," I said. "I doubt we'll find whatever Southerby was sent to find, but we might learn what piqued his interest in Danny Datello in the first place."
"Did you tell them about Linder?" Ned asked.
I turned to the audience. "He's a pig who showed up at the door naked, wondering if I was the playmate he ordered for the afternoon."
Johnny clenched his fists. "Anything else?"
"I spent the afternoon trolling Mercer Boulevard looking for his alibi for the time of the attack on Dr. Ireland," Ned said. "It checked out."
"I'm curious about the Mistress Mercy Divine. What did she say?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I'm not sure which of them is more disgusting, Linder or Divine, whose real name by the way, is Charlene Doyle. She had digital photos with a time stamp. They spent approximately forty-eight hours in character. Her going rate is five hundred a day. No wonder Linder lives in a shit neighborhood."
"So he's really in the clear on this," Orion said. "Samantha Wine will be devastated I'm sure."
"Did she say anything that made Linder stand out as th
e primary suspect?" Devlin asked.
"Mostly she expressed her strong dislike of men in general," Crevan said. "But Johnny got her to talk about Isabella Ireland more than anything. She confirmed that Isabella has been in the Sisters of Mercy Convalescent Home for about three years because of dementia, and that for about half that time, she's been non-verbal."
"Her disease is advancing quickly through the later stages," I said. "She was diagnosed about what, seven or eight years ago?"
"Eight," Devlin said. "Journey was nineteen according to her friend Timothy Evans." He looked to Crevan. "Did you have any luck talking to her friend Trevor Kent with the phone number Journey gave me?"
He nodded. "I spoke to him early this afternoon. He was very upset about what happened to her, but he's been in Africa for the past year. They talk frequently. He mentioned that Journey has become increasingly concerned about her mother's financial situation. Apparently Sisters of Mercy doesn't accept state funds for care. He told me that Journey didn't mention dating anyone else, that she rarely talked about her job at the hospital. For the past two months, all she's done is essentially solicit advice about what to do about the money situation."
"Why wouldn't she just sell the house?" Billy wondered.
"I think I can answer that," I said. "After all, it's been almost twenty years for me, and I still can't bring myself to part with my family home."
"Doc..."
"It's all right, Orion. Everybody here except Devlin knows that I still have a living parent, that my mother died trying to kill my father after their last heist. I can only imagine how conflicted Journey must feel. Her parents were good people. Mine? Not so much, and I still can't bear to part with their home."
"This is just a wild theory," Devlin said, "but what if that's what this is about? Somebody wants Journey to sell the house."
"Thinking that David Ireland might've hidden his evidence against Datello at home instead of the office? It's a theory, Devlin," I said. "But a guy who didn't hesitate to kill Ireland in a government parking building and ransack his office probably wouldn't have hesitated to kill a woman and her daughter to gain access to their house."
"I'm not so sure, Doc," Johnny said. "Think about it. If nothing in David's assigned cases was related to Datello, the investigation was off the grid. What does that suggest?"
"He stumbled onto something that wasn't related to his open cases," Maya said.
"Right," Johnny nodded. "So once he's dead, there's no official record of what he found, maybe even the only evidence that existed was in David's head. It's enough for the killer."
"But not the man who hired him to kill Ireland." Johnny's theory started gelling in my brain. "So if this alleged evidence is hanging over Datello's head all these years, and he's the one that isn't convinced it's not physical evidence that someone else might find, and Journey is facing the sale of the family home... why not simply buy the house?"
"Because she didn't put the place on the market," Devlin said. "She told me that she would rather move into the house and live there rather than see strangers in the place where her happiest memories were made."
"Which brings me back to what Wine said about Isabella," Johnny said. "She was paranoid long before this Pick's disease thing happened. I think she was threatened after David was killed. When she started losing her mind –"
"You make it sound volitional, Johnny. Pick's disease, all the dementias are the result of brain damage. Pick's specifically is caused by an aggregation of tau proteins into spherical clumps in the frontotemporal region of the brain –"
"English, Maya."
I grinned. "Everybody is familiar with the basics of Alzheimer's disease, right? Tangled nerve bundles in the brain, plaque deposits. Tau proteins in Pick's disease form sphere shaped deposits in the brain. The end result is shrinking of the brain itself, or atrophy. It affects the ability to reason, to communicate, to remember recent events, but not necessarily old ones."
"Thanks," Johnny grinned at me. "So, Wine says that it's like Mrs. Ireland is stuck in the time around David's murder. When she was still able to communicate, she was obsessed with the notion that someone was outside her house, trying to get inside."
"It could've been a real event that happened after David died," I said. "What else?"
"Apparently the last thing she said to Journey was honor thy father, which I guess was something she liked to tell her before this disease kicked in. The rest of it –"
"Gibberish, just like Ms. Wine said," Crevan shook his head. "Something about David's disk."
I looked at Zack. "Sixteen years ago, how did the DA's office store information primarily before cases were closed?"
His jaw dropped. "Floppy disks."
Chapter 16
Johnny put a halt to my pacing with an arm that manacled my waist before I could fly by again. "Hey," he said. "Take a breath, Doc."
"That's what Southerby was after, Johnny. Isabella might've been losing her mind, but she knew exactly what she was talking about. You know it. I know it."
"Let's think about this rationally for a minute, what we can prove versus what we suspect."
I nodded. He was right of course.
"Want some more chai?" Johnny's arm still bisected my waist like a steel band. His thumb twitched in half a caress.
I chose to call the resulting sensation nausea, though a couple of months ago, I wasn't kidding myself. It was butterflies, and when the billions of wings flapped, I found it hard to breathe. Wendell's words resurfaced. Don't look behind you, Sprout. You're not going that way.
"Tea would be good."
He released me and called over his shoulder, "What can we prove, what do we suspect. Differentiate between evidence and suspicion, and that's how we decide what happens next."
"We can prove that Southerby killed Ireland. He confessed," Crevan said. "Plus, it's not like the guy could've shot himself in the back of the head."
"And we can prove that Journey's attack is unrelated to her circle of friends past and present, since it's so small," Devlin said.
"We have suspicion but no hard evidence that it's related to David's murder, in large part due to the fact that Journey can't talk and can't remember what her attacker said to her yesterday," I said.
"We suspect that David had physical evidence against Danny Datello that the assassin was supposed to find but couldn't," Zack joined the conversation.
"Bingo," Johnny piped up from the kitchen. "Those files you brought over should be our top priority."
"More notes than files, Johnny," Zack said. "But you're right. We know that ADAs at that time often used floppy disks to store work product before it was a matter of record."
"I don't suppose there's a cache of floppies in this material you brought with you. That would be too easy, huh?"
"Helen, if he left whatever it was laying around, it makes this entire avenue of investigation moot, don't you think?"
"Of course, Zack."
Johnny cupped my elbow and steered me back toward the sofa before handing me another cup of tea. "We'll get there, Doc. Ned, are you up to a little note perusal tonight? Helen's got plenty of space."
"And I can help," I offered too quickly. Should've known better.
"You need your rest."
"We still haven't talked about what Maya and I discovered at the morgue today," Billy said. "It sort of relates to this. Maybe. I mean, we couldn't find anything more about Southerby's cause of death, but we did learn that Riley Storm's first sloppy autopsy was the one he performed right before Southerby's murder."
"Whose?" Johnny tapped Devlin's knee until he slid over and sat beside me on the sofa.
Maya leaned over and peered around my cup of chai tea. "Harry McNamara. Were you aware that he died three days before Southerby?"
"I seem to recall that Tony Briscoe and I missed the funeral because we were out east extraditing Southerby from New Jersey."
"There's another thing we know," I said. "Southerby was probably linke
d to Datello through the Marcos crime family. This I'm sure can be verified through FBI records."
"Really?" Johnny frowned. "Should I contact Levine?"
"Or I could."
The mouth set stubbornly. "I don't think so, Doc."
"Yeah, because you know he'd never take your side in this."
"He would if he got a look at what you've done to yourself. Do you really want to open that door right now?"
"Now, later, what difference does it make? They're busy building the case against Sully." I wondered for a moment if Johnny knew that Avery Ritter showed up to question me. Hadn't David said they left messages for me? Was Johnny keeping information from me?
"I'd think you've had enough people appalled by your current condition without adding more reinforcement that you went beyond too far."
"And you keep talking about this like it was intentional. Have I not gone along with your plan to make me healthy again?"
"Technically, but not in spirit."
"You'll have to take my word for it. Eddie Franchetta was not the first hired gun Marcos ever used. Southerby was part of the team."
"We'll accept that at face value for the time being," Johnny said.
My mind skipped backward to a detail nobody had previously mentioned. I turned my focus on Billy. "You said that McNamara died three days before Southerby."
"Right."
"And you," at Orion, "said you and Tony missed the funeral because you were extraditing Southerby from New Jersey."
"Uh-huh," Johnny nodded.
"Three days. How long did it take you to get Southerby back and in the box to question him and get his confession before he keeled over dead?"
Johnny rubbed his goatee. "Well, let me see. We got the green light from Harry to fly east after we got the tip that Southerby was picked up on some minor charge in Jersey day after New Year's."
