I laid my hand on hers. “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. We don’t know what happened yet.”
“Lieutenant Gunther?”
I turned at the voice coming from the doorway. Janet Kohler stood on the threshold, holding a file in her hand. “Be right there,” I said.
I returned to Esther Pallini. “Thanks for talking with me. I’ll see you again later. And don’t worry about it, okay?”
“Thank you. I’ll be fine.”
I stepped out into the corridor with Janet Kohler.
“I called Sue Pasco. She’s coming right over. I also called Dr. Riley… Was that okay?”
“Sure,” I said, although I’d been planning to do that later, after I’d gathered a few more facts. “Is there somewhere we can talk more privately?”
She led me down the hall to a small, cluttered office and closed the door behind us. I gestured for her to sit at the desk while I chose a small bench lining the wall. “Did anyone here contact the next of kin?”
The head nurse looked vaguely insulted. “Of course. Once the doctor’s signed the certificate, that’s the next thing we do. Sometimes the family likes to visit the body in the room, sometimes not, but it’s our policy to give them the opportunity.”
“What time did she die?”
She consulted the file she was still holding in her hand. “Dr. Riley declared her dead at 2:08 this morning. I have no way of knowing when she actually died.”
“Right,” I muttered, “but there was no sense of alarm about her death?”
“None at all. She was a heavily medicated congestive heart patient, with both COPD—that’s bad lungs—and diabetes complications, and she was grossly overweight. We’d all been expecting her to die for months.”
“But she could still get around.”
“Oh sure—lots of people can, right up to the end. She wasn’t fast on her feet—don’t get me wrong—but she did all right.”
“I gather she wasn’t too popular.”
Janet Kohler looked at me steadily for a moment, as if weighing her options. I was pleased with her final choice. “She was a bitch.”
“Thanks for the honesty. Did she have any enemies, or people who disliked her more than others?”
“I’d say the second more than the first.”
“I’ll have someone get those names from you. How about the home in general—is it a good place to work?”
The tension in her face eased a bit. “I love it here. For the most part, the residents are wonderful, the staff knows its stuff, and management is very supportive. We spend a lot of time coming up with things the residents can do together, and it helps everyone stay young, at least mentally. I used to work in places—some of them pretty famous—where the residents might as well have been animals. All cooped up, with nothing to challenge their minds. We’re very interactive here. It doesn’t cost any more, and when you think of it, it helps us, too—makes the job more interesting and rewarding. You were talking with Mrs. Pallini—how did she seem to you?”
“Very content,” I admitted. “Speaking of her, she implied the patients have pretty free rein to wander.”
Kohler smiled broadly. “She tell you about the hanky-panky? It’s absolutely true. Some of that goes on. As for the more innocent wandering, we do have people that bear watching—the Alzheimers tend to roam, especially at night, and a few others need to be restricted to a single area of the home. It’s a passive kind of restraint, though—just so they don’t hurt themselves, or somebody else by mistake. Except that we keep a sharp eye peeled for any health changes, all the rest are pretty much free to come and go as they please. The only restriction we impose is that no one spontaneously leave the building.”
“You do bed checks, then?”
“Yes, and we monitor the building’s exits and access to some of the home’s special areas. The residents try to pull a fast one now and then, sneaking around for some late-night high-jinks, but we usually know what’s going on—we just pretend we don’t.”
“Is there a fair amount of activity in the halls after hours?”
“No. I think we play it up slightly because most of them get such a kick out of it—keeps them young in spirit, anyway. To be honest, we’re not talking about more than a handful.”
“You said the Alzheimer’s patients wandered at night.”
“Oh—I see what you mean. Yeah—that happens sometimes—it’s fairly typical of the disease, but… You’re not thinking one of them did this, are you?”
I smiled to reassure her. “No, no. I’m not thinking much of anything right now. We’ve got a lot more digging to do still. I am curious, though, about Mrs. Sawyer’s next of kin. Who do you have listed?”
She opened the file and began leafing through it. “It’s funny—I’ve never met them. As far as I know, she’s never had an outside visitor—family or otherwise… Here it is. Annabelle Tuttle—Spruce Street. You’d think she would drop by every once in a while—must be all of a ten-minute drive.” She handed me the file so I could copy the address.
There was a knock on the door as I was finishing up, and the patrolman who’d been guarding Mrs. Sawyer’s door poked his head in. “Phone call, Lieutenant—from St. Johnsbury. I think it’s line three.”
“Thanks—be right there.” I turned to Janet Kohler. “I guess that’s it for the moment. If you’d like to get back to what you were doing, go ahead. I appreciate all your help.”
Kohler rose and crossed to the door. “Happy to do so, Lieutenant. I’ll bring Sue and the doctor to see you as soon as they get here. Shouldn’t be too much longer.” She pointed at the phone on the desk. “Feel free to use that.”
I waited until the door had closed behind her before picking up the receiver. “This is Joe Gunther.”
“Hi Joe, it’s Mel. Sorry it took so long to get back to you. We had to hunt around for your friend. We ended up just taking him to the barracks—easier than finding a pay phone. I’ll put him on. Good luck, buddy.”
“Thanks.”
A few moments later, Ned Fallows’s voice came on the line, sounding cautious. “Joe? What’s the problem?”
I decided to play it hard-nosed, hoping that might get me better mileage than the approach I’d used last night, but also because I was tired and angry and no longer interested in games. “Things have changed down here, Ned. I want some straight answers.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mary Wallis disappeared last night. It’s looking like an abduction, and it’s anyone’s guess if she’s still alive. Since the building project’s the one common denominator we keep coming across, I need to know who put the squeeze on you. Now.”
“It’s not connected, Joe.”
“I’ll decide that. You talk to me now, or I’ll charge you in connection with her murder if Mary Wallis turns up dead.”
After a long, deliberating pause, he said in a barely audible whisper, “Tom Chambers—NeverTom.”
“Why?”
“He’d discovered something I’d done years before—a mistake. I thought I’d buried it, but he’d known all along. He’d just put it in his ‘rainy day fund,’ as he called it, for future use.”
“What was the deal? Vote his way just this once, and he’d let you off?”
“The way things worked out, he got his money’s worth.”
I couldn’t argue the point, although I was hoping the State’s Attorney might eventually.
His next comment, however, made that a more complicated issue. “I won’t repeat what I just said, though, no matter how many subpoenas you hit me with. Nor will I answer any more questions. I only told you this much so you’d let it be.”
I opened my mouth to give him hell but then realized the futility of it. The Ned Fallows of old had been drowned by self-pity and perhaps self-loathing. I’d gotten what I wanted for the moment. Finding him later wasn’t going to be a problem.
“We’ll see, Ned. I’ll do what has to be done. But if Mary Wallis suffers
because of something you’re not telling me right now, you will bear the consequences.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he replied, his voice emotionless. “I’m way ahead of you.”
The line went dead.
18
TALKING WITH NED FALLOWS had both angered and saddened me. In the same way domestic disputes show how love can turn to violence, Fallows had shown me how a man’s ego, once used as a beacon for righteous behavior, could be twisted to stand for self-absorption and denial. Now faced with two homicides, a suspicious death, a disappearance, and a corruption case touching the town’s leading family, I had little tolerance for Ned’s mourning his own fallen image. That his vanity might be impeding our locating Mary Wallis made me furious.
I looked up from these reflections to see a middle-aged woman in jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair tied back, timidly standing by the half-open door. Her voice was strained with tension. “Janet said you wanted to see me? You didn’t answer when I knocked. I’m Sue Pasco.”
I rose and beckoned her to sit. “Joe Gunther. Thanks for coming. Please—make yourself comfortable.”
She perched on the chair’s edge, her legs tucked under her and her hands flat by her thighs, looking like a diver about to spring into the water.
“Is it all right if I call you Sue?” I asked.
She nodded tightly. “Everyone does.”
“Great—call me Joe. I’ve been told you were in charge last night when Mrs. Sawyer passed away. Is that right?”
Again she nodded, her body still frozen in place. “Was she really murdered?”
“We think so. An autopsy’s being done right now. How was Mrs. Sawyer discovered?”
Sue Pasco spoke quietly, in choppy sentences, as if fearful that longer ones might be traced back to her. “She was sick. On meds. They get checked. To see if they’re okay.”
“You do rounds, in other words.”
“Sort of.”
“Several times a night?”
“Yes. Ten, one, and three.”
“So it was during the one o’clock check that you found her.”
Her head dropped so I couldn’t see her face. “Yes.”
“Sue. Are you worried you did something wrong?” I asked, distracted by the intensity of her distress.
Her features were all twisted, her eyes brimming with tears. “I don’t know.”
“You followed the same procedure you do every night, right?”
“Yes.”
I touched her shoulder gently. “Then you don’t have anything to worry about. Just concentrate on my questions, and be absolutely honest. A terrible thing has happened, but it won’t reflect badly on you as long as you tell me everything you know.”
I paused to let her absorb that. “Okay. What happened when you checked on Mrs. Sawyer?”
She collected herself and then spoke in more measured tones, her eyes fixed on the floor. “We don’t knock, so as not to disturb them if they’re sleeping, but I thought something was wrong as soon as I opened the door.”
“Why?”
“There wasn’t any sound. She always snored. That’s why we moved her next to Esther. Nothing wakes Esther up.”
“What did you do then?”
“I felt for a pulse and discovered she was dead.”
“Did you start CPR, or call for help?”
“She had a DNR—a Do Not Resuscitate order. We’re not supposed to take any heroic measures with them. Those are the words they use—heroic measures—like CPR.”
“So you called for help instead?” I prompted.
She tucked her head again and began to shake. Given both Esther Pallini’s and Janet Kohler’s casualness concerning death, I wondered if Sue Pasco’s sensitivity might not be connected to something else.
I crouched by her seat and grabbed her forearm, forcing her to look at me. I opted for a standard interrogation ploy. “Sue, tell me what’s troubling you. If it comes out now, we can try to fix it. The worst thing you can do is let it fester inside.”
“I didn’t want to wake anybody up. I didn’t know… ” Her voice trailed off.
“… Didn’t know she’d been murdered?” She nodded, sobbing openly now.
“You’re saying you didn’t call for help? How did the doctor get here?”
Between sobs she gasped, “I called him. We’re supposed to get another staffer. As a witness to the death. It’s like a law or something. But we knew she was going to die. It was no big deal. So I let them all sleep. It never mattered before. And now it’s a murder… And I could go to jail.”
I squeezed her hand and reached for the file on Sawyer that Janet Kohler had left behind. I flipped to the back to see where Sue’s name and signature appeared, along with someone else’s, under the timed and dated heading, “Discovery of deceased.”
I showed her the sheet. “You cooked the books, right? Had the other person listed here add her signature early this morning, after she woke up?”
Sue Pasco nodded miserably, slumped back in her chair.
I glanced farther down the sheet. “I take it Dr. Riley played along? His signature’s here, too.”
“He told me once it was bureaucratic nonsense.”
I closed the file and sat back down. “Guess you won’t do that again.”
She looked up, surprise showing through the tears at my casual tone of voice. “You’re not going to tell?”
“Not right now. And not ever if I don’t think it has anything to do with the case. What’s important to me is that the rest of it is accurate—the time you discovered her, for example.”
She slid forward in her seat again, this time eagerly, wiping at her cheeks with the palms of her hands. “Oh no—it’s all true. I checked my watch as soon as I turned on the light—1:22—I still remember. Then I closed the door and locked it, like they tell us, and I phoned Dr. Riley, since he’s on the call list this week. I waited for him by the front entrance, took him up here, he examined her, and signed the death certificate. After that, I called Guillaume’s so they could get her out before the other residents woke up.”
I gave her a supportive smile. “Okay. That’s great. Now, thinking back to before you checked on her, did you notice anything unusual in the hallway, or anywhere else for that matter? Any sounds, any activity? Did you see anyone?”
She paused to reflect. “I always see a few people. Not all of the residents sleep well, so sometimes they wander around—watch TV, read—”
“But nobody struck you as acting odd?”
“No.”
“Were any of them on this floor?”
“No. It was empty.”
“How ’bout after you found the body? Did you see anyone then?”
“No. And we worked very quietly. By 2:45 Mrs. Sawyer was gone.”
I thought back to what Janet Kohler had told me. “Did you contact the next of kin? You didn’t mention that.”
Her face grew suddenly agitated and defensive. “I did, I did. You can check. I just forgot because it didn’t matter. Mrs. Tuttle didn’t care one way or the other. She was even a little irritated—asked me why I couldn’t have waited to call her in the morning.”
“You ever meet her?”
“No. But you could tell they were relatives by their attitude.”
I glanced down at the file. “They were sisters?”
“I think so.”
I closed the file and sat back. “I’ve been told Mrs. Sawyer wasn’t well liked—that she spread rumors, got into fights… ”
“I guess so. Being on the night shift, I missed most of that, but she wasn’t a nice person.”
“Could you list everyone who might have had a grudge against her, for one of my officers a little later?”
“You don’t think one of the residents did it, do you?”
“I can’t say yet.”
“I can come up with a few names, I guess. Some of it would be sort of like gossip, though.”
“That’s okay. Your list w
ill be confidential. We just need something to get us started. Who stripped the bed?”
“I did. She’d peed all over herself, and I wanted to get the sheets cleaned as soon as possible.”
That was disappointing. “So they’ve been laundered?”
“Oh, yes… ”
“Is that pretty typical—a patient peeing on herself before dying?”
“Common enough. Sometimes it’s worse—their bowels open up.”
“But aside from taking the sheets, everything else was left the way you found it?”
She nodded vigorously. “Absolutely, and the door was locked again.”
“One last question. What’s the security like on the building’s exits?”
“All the doors are locked after nine, and the front entrance has a guard to let people in and out.”
“How ’bout fire exits?”
“They all have alarms.” She gave me a small smile. “And we know they work, because every once in a while, one of the residents tries them out.”
I rose to my feet and thanked her, telling her somebody would contact her later for that list of names. I watched her hurry down the corridor, no doubt to compare experiences with Janet Kohler, or to call the colleague who’d faked witnessing the discovery of the body.
I had the strong impression Sue Pasco wouldn’t be bending any rules for a long time to come.
· · ·
J.P. and his crew were still scrutinizing Adele Sawyer’s room, but I could tell from the doorway they weren’t happy. Each one of them toiled in silence, obviously going through the motions with nothing to show for it. “No luck?” I asked.
J.P. looked up. “There’re enough fingerprints, hair follicles, and loose threads to start a museum. If you want this done right, I’ll have to print and take hair samples from everyone in this place, and even then I doubt I’d have anything to go on.”
Sammie was sitting at the small table by the window, leafing through a thin pile of papers and letters. “Nothing here, either. Mostly insurance forms, bills, official correspondence. Some junk mail she kept. There’re a few family pictures, including a group shot—looks like a reunion—but no personal letters. The best I could find was an address book. Not too many entries, but I’ll chase them all down.”
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