“Mimi Van Dorn signed a waiver, as all my patients do.”
“You mean the patients you deceive and steal from, Doctor.”
I expected Clifton to bristle at that, but he didn’t. “So what brings you here on your own tonight, Mrs. Fletcher, if not to make trouble?”
“To make a deal.”
Chapter Thirty
“I know you killed Mimi Van Dorn.”
Clifton bristled visibly at that, remaining silent to see what I’d say next.
“You had help, Doctor,” I continued, “but you’re still a direct party to her murder.”
“You’ve read too many of your own books, Mrs. Fletcher. Not everyone you don’t like is the boogeyman.”
“In my experience, there’s no one boogeyman—there are thousands. Many of them dressed in the best costume of all, that of respectability and success. Boogeymen like that believe their power shields and emboldens their deeds. I read and write about them because it helps me deal with the fact that they’re out there, living right next door or around the corner. Just like you and this clinic, where you’re supposed to be helping people instead of killing them.”
“Last I checked, Mimi Van Dorn didn’t die here.”
“But this is where she was killed, because it’s where you gave her this potentially groundbreaking antiaging drug supplied to you by LGX Pharmaceuticals.” Something occurred to me in that moment I hadn’t considered yet. “Tell me, Doctor, if one of these drugs you’re conducting fake trials for hits, how much might you and Jeffrey Archibald stand to make? Ten million dollars, fifty million, a hundred? Even more? I guess it might be capitalism at its best, if you weren’t endangering the lives of so many like Mimi Van Dorn.”
I waited for Clifton to comment, but instead he sat smugly in his desk chair, his pasty face caught in the glow of the fake flames coming from the equally fake hearth.
“And how much richer might the two of you get once all those other Clifton Care Partners clinics open? A friend of mine is having a forensic audit conducted to reveal the names of your investors. I suspect Jeffrey Archibald will be at the top of that list.”
“Which proves nothing,” Clifton said, finally finding his voice. “Particularly my complicity in Mimi Van Dorn’s death.”
“Maybe not, but it does suggest motive. All that money you stood to make jeopardized by a patient—subject actually—suffering devastating side effects in public view. You couldn’t risk Mimi awaking from that coma and coming clean about the clinical trial she’d paid you a fortune to be a part of. So she had to die, which explains your presence at the hospital.”
“Except I left the hospital at least an hour before the code was called. I suspect the security footage of the lobby and doctors’ parking lot will confirm that.”
“This would be the footage from the day of her death?”
“What else would it be, Mrs. Fletcher?”
“The day before, like the footage from the ICU, which had been tampered with.”
“And that makes me a suspect?”
“It does indeed, Doctor, because you’re the one who tampered with it.”
* * *
• • •
Again, Clifton showed no response, remaining smug and stoic, which was plenty of response in itself.
“You seem partial to three-piece suits,” I noted. “Glen plaid being your favorite.”
“Is that a crime, too, Mrs. Fletcher?”
“Only as far as fashion goes. You might recall, though, when I saw you in the ICU hall after you returned upon learning of Mimi’s death, I noted the tears in your pants, even with the knees. You told me you’d slipped on the pavement someplace and scraped them up.”
“Because it’s the truth.”
“No, it’s not,” I told him, reaching into my bag and handing a folded sheet of paper across the desk. “Take a look.”
I watched Clifton straighten the page out to reveal a still shot of him entering Cabot Cove Hospital, lifted from a lobby security camera.
“What is this?”
“It was taken a few minutes before you paid that fateful early morning visit to Mimi Van Dorn. It was your knees I was most interested in.”
“My knees?”
I handed another picture across his desk. “You can see them better in this version.” Clifton didn’t unfold the printed photo this time, but I continued anyway. “No tears in your suit, Doctor, which means you were lying about that fall, because you tore your trousers after you entered the hospital and not before.”
He remained stiff and silent behind his desk.
“You entered Mimi’s room on the pretext of wanting to check in on her. But what you really wanted was to access the crawl space through the hatchway in the closet. Turns out that crawl space runs directly to the video-monitoring station, which was empty at the time. I imagine you reached it without incident, besides those tears in your pants, and proceeded to change the security loop for the ICU camera to the day before for the next several hours. Something you could’ve been quite adept at, given that your clinic boasts an almost identical security system.”
“Interesting,” Clifton noted, summoning all the bravado he could. “You can’t prove any of this, but it does make for a great story. More interesting, I suspect, than the ones you make up.”
“Reality always is, Doctor. What I couldn’t figure out for the life of me was what you were trying to hide. What was it that would’ve been visible for all to see if you hadn’t swapped that day’s loop for the previous day’s?”
I made him wait for what I was going to say next.
“The arrival of Jeffrey Archibald,” I said finally. “He waited until the nurses’ station was empty before entering Mimi’s room. That’s when he pulled the cord of the machine out just enough to cut the power, while still making it appear like an accident, an explanation everyone would have otherwise accepted.”
“Unless it really was an accident, Mrs. Fletcher. And now you, and that vivid imagination of yours, are making the rest up.”
“But here’s something I didn’t make up: Jeffrey Archibald’s BMW.”
“What about it?”
“The car was parked on a street just beyond the hospital right around the time of Mimi Van Dorn’s death.”
Clifton nodded dismissively. “Don’t tell me—it was caught on a traffic camera that must’ve been installed that very day, since Cabot Cove doesn’t boast any traffic cameras.”
“No, Doctor, it wasn’t a traffic camera; it was a parking ticket.”
* * *
• • •
“The sheriff’s department has been issuing them all day and night to deal with the clutter of cars packing our streets without parking permits,” I told him, reveling in his blank expression. “It helps Sheriff Metzger fund the extra deputies he needs for the summer months. And in this case, a patrolman issued the ticket perhaps at the very moment the car’s owner was pulling the plug on Mimi Van Dorn’s ventilator.”
Charles Clifton looked like a man coming to grips with the fact that his GPS app had gotten him lost, nothing he could do to easily dismiss the information Deputy Andy had provided in response to my query.
“Just because his car was here,” he groped, “doesn’t mean Archibald was driving it.”
“Reasonable doubt, in other words.”
“You take issue with that, Mrs. Fletcher?”
“Not at all. It’s why I came here.”
“To make a deal, you said,” he recalled.
“You’re right, Doctor, I probably don’t have enough proof or hard evidence to get Sheriff Metzger to arrest you. But my mere trying would, at the very least, draw attention to what’s really going on here, including your deal with the devil in Jeffrey Archibald.”
“He mentioned his wife was a big fan of yours.”
“Not quite enough for me to let him get off scot-free on this. I can’t put him in jail for the rest of his life, but I might be able to ruin the two of you for just about that long. Unless . . .” I finished dramatically, letting my voice trail off.
“Unless what?” Clifton asked, taking the bait.
“You give me George Sutherland.”
* * *
• • •
“What makes you think I have him?”
“He’s gone, and he was last seen here, on these premises.”
“I last saw him here, too.”
“He’s also a chief inspector of Scotland Yard, and thus a threat if he latched on to what you’re really up to in this place.”
“You mean, all the things you planted in his mind? Did it ever occur to you, Mrs. Fletcher, that you are very likely responsible for his turning away from the only treatment that can save his life? That kind of responsibility is a hard burden to bear.”
“Coming from someone as expert in the matter as you, Doctor, I suppose I should take that to heart.”
“You think I kidnapped George Sutherland. You think I’m holding him here against his will when a far more rational explanation is that he threw himself off these cliffs to the rocky waters below. But you don’t want to face that possibility, because it would mean you were responsible for his death. So you concocted this ridiculous story to blame me for whatever happened to him.”
“Don’t forget Jeffrey Archibald.”
“That would be hard to do,” a voice rang out from behind me, “given that I’m standing right here.”
Chapter Thirty-one
“Then you heard my proposal,” I said, turning toward him in my chair.
“Dr. Clifton is telling the truth, Mrs. Fletcher. George Sutherland isn’t here. And whatever fate he suffered came from his own volition.”
“And you know that because—let me guess—the good doctor assured you it was true. I wonder if you might be reacting differently if he admitted the truth.”
“Assuming this hidden truth reveals itself, or if we were in a position to turn Sutherland over to you, what guarantees do we have you wouldn’t continue this investigation of yours anyway?”
“Because you think you’ve covered every base, a couple of would-be geniuses who believe they committed the perfect crime. And that might well have been true if it hadn’t been for that parking ticket, Mr. Archibald.”
“I’m glad I decided not to buy a place up here.”
“Speaking on behalf of all of Cabot Cove, so are we.” I rotated my gaze between the two of them. “What I really don’t understand is, why take the risk involved with murdering Mimi when she was likely never going to wake up anyway? Killing her made necessary the autopsy that revealed your drug to be the cause of her seizure. Sure, it would have come out eventually anyway, thanks to the anomaly that came up in the tox screen. But your actions basically assured we’d find out about that potential antiaging miracle you must have sold her some bill of goods on. Unless . . . ” I continued when Clifton and Archibald exchanged an uneasy glance. “Unless you were more worried about the possibility Mimi was going to wake up, afraid of something she’d say that was worth killing her over.”
“You knew the woman better than we did,” Archibald proclaimed, drawing a caustic glare from Clifton. “So why don’t you just tell us, make it up as you go along just like you did all the rest of this?”
“Blackmail,” I realized. “You actually knew Mimi even better than I did, didn’t you? You knew she’d spent just about every dollar she had left on this treatment. I think she figured out what the two of you were really up to, which would’ve made great fodder to bring you down . . . unless you paid her off, of course.”
And then it hit me, something that hadn’t even entered my mind until that very moment. “Oh my . . . How could I not have seen it?”
My eyes darted between the two men as their stares locked knowingly.
“That seizure she suffered in the library was supposed to kill Mimi. The two of you murdered her twice.”
* * *
• • •
I focused my gaze on Clifton. “I blamed you for giving her a drug you knew might kill her. Except you did it on purpose, the last dosage anyway. You gave her enough of that drug to produce exactly the effect on her nervous system that you expected it to. And when that only resulted in putting her in a coma, from which she could conceivably awake with quite a story to tell, you came back and finished the job.”
Jeffrey Archibald started clapping. “I can see why my wife’s such a fan. You really can tell a story, Mrs. Fletcher. I suspect you might call this one Murder in Red—red for blood.”
“Nice title.”
“I look forward to you inscribing a copy of that one for me, too.”
“Well, they do have libraries in prison, Mr. Archibald.”
He shook his head. “It’s really true, isn’t it, what they say about you?”
“What’s that?”
“That you’ve got a sixth sense for murder.”
“I like that title, too,” I told him.
“But you won’t be needing it, because you’re never going to get the chance to write another book.”
I remained in my chair. “So you’re planning on making me disappear, too?”
“We didn’t make George Sutherland disappear,” Dr. Clifton insisted, repeating the claim yet again.
“You, on the other hand . . .” Archibald started, leaving it there.
“You think nobody knows I’m here?”
I’d aimed my question at Clifton, who cast a sidelong glance toward Archibald instead of responding. That glance suggested subservience, one man looking for direction from another.
“I had it all wrong, didn’t it?” I realized, moving my gaze between the two of them, before letting it rest again on Clifton. “I thought you were the one driving this, Doctor, what with your plan to expand Clifton Care Partners all over the country.”
“Don’t forget the world, Mrs. Fletcher.” Archibald smirked, virtually confirming my suspicions.
“Of course,” I said, my thoughts forming into words, “it all started with you, with seeking a way to exploit LGX Pharmaceuticals’ considerable collection of drug patents to make yourself a fortune. All you needed was a patsy, a doctor whose ambitions mirrored your own. And you found your front man in Dr. Clifton. Tell me,” I continued, addressing both of them, “have I got it right now?”
Clifton sat stoic and still behind his desk, leaving the floor to Archibald, which further confirmed my suspicions.
“You did us a great favor by riding your bike here,” Archibald said. “A moonless night, all those rocks on the bluffs, anyone could lose their way and end up in the waters below.”
I felt the steady creep of fear swallow the determination and resolve that had gotten me this far. I began to suspect that I’d been wrong in one crucial assumption, something my presence here should have invoked that had not yet proved the case. Still, I did my best to hold fast.
“A biking accident?” I tried, aiming my words at Archibald. “Really?”
But it was Clifton who answered me. “There’ll be doubts, suspicions, but nothing that can possibly lead anywhere, especially on the part of that two-bit cop you call a sheriff.”
“Mort did twenty years with the NYPD, Doctor. Maybe you’ve heard of them.”
“All the same,” interjected Archibald, “there’ll be nothing to investigate, because it’s going to look like an accident. And, from what I hear about these waters, your body may not even wash up until next summer.”
I weighed my options, found none. My life now depended on a ridiculous assumption I’d led myself to believe was the truth, based on a cryptic clue that could’ve been explained several other ways.
I heard the door to Clifton’s office open and c
lose, turned my head round just enough to see two big men who might as well have been twins from their black outfits, close-cropped haircuts, and steely demeanor. They had private military written all over them. Professionals, as opposed to thugs. I guess Clifton and Archibald were pulling out all the stops to ensure nothing impeded the continued building of clinics all over the country. Patients be damned, they were going to expand their plan of fake clinical trials that were pay-to-participate, to reap hundreds of millions in profit.
I felt the two men, the Almost Twins, approaching my chair, their grasps when they took me by either arm feeling like steel vises.
“It looks like the legendary Jessica Fletcher has finally met her match.” Archibald smirked, as the Almost Twins led me past him toward the door. “Looks like I’m going to have to put that book you signed for my wife away for safekeeping, since it’s going to be the last one you’ll ever sign.”
“We’ll see about that,” I managed, lamely.
“Still putting on a brave face,” noted Archibald. “If I didn’t know better, Charles, I’d say the little lady here still has a trick up her sleeve.”
“This little lady,” I said to him, starting to realize I didn’t have that trick or anything else up my sleeve, that what I’d come here expecting to happen had been wishful thinking all along, “is an inch taller than you.”
Archibald grinned, his teeth so blindingly white, it looked like he gargled with Clorox. “It was nice meeting you, Mrs. Fletcher. Thanks for signing my wife’s book.”
The Almost Twins pulled me the rest of the way from the room, looking like androids from some science fiction movie. Their expressions didn’t move; their hair didn’t move. Their motions seemed more programmed than planned. I’d dealt with other men like this in my time, though hardly under this kind of dire threat from them. They could kill a person and give it no more thought than swatting a fly or stepping on a cockroach. The secret to their success was to dehumanize their victims, regard them as no more vital than that fly or roach, to be swatted or stepped on. Go about their business of tossing me and my bike over the side of the bluffs and then report back for further duty.
Murder, She Wrote--Murder in Red Page 22
