Dying for Compassion (The Lady Doc Murders Book 2)

by Dr. Barbara Golder

  As she pulled off her damp gloves and unwound the scarf from her neck, she took her place in line behind a tall man in a black ski suit, his heavy orange boots unlatched to permit him some semblance of mobility off the slopes. She recognized them as the hot ticket item from several seasons ago and concluded the man was not only a serious skier but probably a local. Even she had noticed that the visitors often, if not usually, made the ski shop their first stop. Ah well, I suppose skiwear is as good a souvenir as any, she thought as the man moved on, and she took her place at the counter to order.

  “Hi, Sadie.” The slight woman with the brown dreadlocks tossed a smile in Sadie’s direction before turning to call out. “Soymilk vanilla latte, two shots, to go.”

  “What would you do it I decided I wanted something different, Gretchen? Maybe a whole milk mocha,” Sadie teased.

  Gretchen turned back, grabbing the second half of Sadie’s usual order, an almond croissant with chocolate filling, as she did. She pushed it across the counter with one hand and received Sadie’s credit card with the other. “Drink it myself, I guess. Sorry to hear about your job.”

  Sadie shrugged. “It happens. I kind of liked it here, though. And for the life of me, I can’t think what I did to piss Dr. Wallace off.” A frown passed over her face. As much as she did not like to admit it, the firing rankled, even though she had applied for the job on the spur of the moment with no real intention of making it permanent. In the short time she had been in Telluride, the town had settled comfortably into her heart, and she would miss it. Besides, firing hurt her ego in places she hadn’t even known she had. And, as much as it pained her more, she’d miss the Center and Dr. Wallace, too, even though she was still trying to figure out how both of them operated. So different from the hectic, impersonal, big-city morgue she trained in. Moving out of the Center felt a lot like losing a home.

  “Still, sorry. Are you going to stay around?”

  “Probably through ski season.” It was the reason she came in the first place, and there was more than enough in the checking account to see her through the winter, job or not, and Dr. Wallace included rent in a condo over one of the fancier restaurants in Mountain Village for three months in the severance package. “More time for the slopes.”

  It was Gretchen’s turn to shrug as she put down the latte. Sadie took her pastry in one hand, the coffee in the other, and searched the room for a seat.

  She found one in the back, an unoccupied overstuffed chair next to the steps that led to the near-legendary bathrooms, with their murals of space aliens and rainforests. Sadie shed her coat and snow boots and sat down, curling her legs under her and reaching for her drink and the morning paper. She was halfway through the opinion page — this one discussing with great vigor the proposal to create overflow parking at the edge of town — when she heard a familiar voice and looked up to see Lucy Cho standing over her.

  “Mind if I join you?” Lucy gestured toward the mate of Sadie’s chair, now empty and just enough cater-corner from Sadie not to be beside her.

  “Sure! I’d like the company.” Telluride had proved a difficult town for Sadie to make friends. She and Lucy hit it off from the first day she was in the office. Lucy was one person Sadie really missed. Her apartment on the third floor of the Center was next door to Sadie’s, and they had often shared meals, drinks, and conversation late into the night.

  “I thought you might keep in touch after you left. I thought we had a pretty good friendship going,” Lucy said with no preamble and her customary directness. “Why haven’t you been by?”

  Sadie shrugged. “Uncomfortable, I guess. I’ve never been fired before. And I still have no idea why I was. Hurt pride, maybe?” A pause, and then, “I’m sorry. Friends again?”

  “Friends again. I can see that hurt pride thing. It’s weird. For what it’s worth, none of us had the least idea, either.” Lucy deftly pre-empted Sadie’s next question; the woman had an uncanny sixth sense that way. “Anyway, I miss you. Glad you aren’t mad at me. What’s up?”

  “Not much. Licking my wounds. Sending out resumes. Something will turn up. And Dr. Wallace gave me a nice letter. Shouldn’t be too hard to find something.”

  “As well she should.” Lucy’s eyes flashed a bit. “Bad enough she fires you, but then she takes off for kingdom come and leaves us in the lurch.” Lucy unwrapped an elaborate pastry with cream and cheese filling, topped with bright, glazed fruit.

  “I see you are still smuggling in sweets. There’s nothing like that here.” Sadie smiled.

  “We have an agreement, the Bean and I. I’ll buy food here when it’s up to my standards.” She took a bite, wiped a bit of cream from her lips, and continued. “We sure could use you at the Center.”

  Another shrug. “I know Dr. Wallace brought in a locum. No good?”

  “Good enough. Not you. You’re better.”

  “Thanks.” It was nice to know someone appreciated her abilities.

  “Take those kids and that old lady that died.”

  “You mean Skye and Summer Gleason and Elsie Teague?” Sadie sat back a bit, surprised that she’d so easily internalized Dr. Wallace’s habit of referring to the dead by their names. “What’s up? Investigation stalled?”

  Lucy nodded, still chewing. She swallowed, took a gulp of coffee and added, “It irritates me to no end that we know what killed them, but not how they died. Dr. Wallace was pretty sure it was an accident, but we can’t prove it and it’s bothering all of us.” Lucy’s expression darkened. “And there’s that other kid, too, the one that had some lipid disease. Dr. Wallace is pretty sure she was murdered, and I found potassium in the IV injection port. But we can’t prove it. I don’t like loose ends.”

  Sadie smiled. That particular characteristic, along with unusual excellence in their chosen fields, was probably the thread that tied the very different personalities of the Center together. Like their boss, they wanted to know, down to the last details, and to solve the puzzle of unexpected death.

  “Wish I could help.”

  The corner of Lucy’s mouth turned up. “Who says you can’t? You must be going crazy with nothing much to do.”

  “Dr. Wallace would skin you alive.” Sadie had to admit the idea was appealing. Skiing was fun. Forensic medicine was her lifeblood.

  “Dr. Wallace doesn’t need to know. What say we make this our office? I’ll come back by this afternoon with a CD of the files. Bring your laptop, and we’ll go over what we’ve got. If we figure this out, Dr. Wallace will be…” Lucy seemed to struggle for words. Her boss expected perfection, so providing answers was nothing special. She regrouped. “Let’s just say, I don’t want to be around if we don’t figure this out. And might not be,” she added.

  Sadie considered the possibility. It was a risk. It violated all manner of confidentialities. But Lucy was right. Sadie was bored, and it bothered her more than she wanted to admit that she had missed one poisoning and then been tossed out before she could redeem herself by solving all three. And this other one, this death-maybe-murder of yet another child intrigued her. And as much as she didn’t want to admit it to herself, the death of kids, any kids, bothered her. A lot.

  She thought a moment more and asked cautiously, “Do you have authority to engage consultants?”

  “Never tried. But I have pretty free rein in my area. So yes, I guess so. Nobody here to say no, anyway.”

  “Well, then meet your new consultant. See you back here at — say, two-thirty?”

  Lucy Cho smiled and raised the remains of her pastry in salute.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  My bags were packed for my jaunt northward in the morning. Dinner in the hotel restaurant was excellent. I was well fed and should be getting well rested, but I decided to look over the information I had on Eoin one more time. There must be something I missed. Something. Anything. Anything to provide reasonable doubt that Eoin Connor killed Fiona.

  I’d long since given up on exoneration. Reasonable doubt would do. I
was appalled at myself, but I kept working. I who had been so indignant at Tough Tommy Berton’s lawyers’ attempts to raise doubts about his murder of my husband. Here I was hoping to do the same thing for Eoin Connor. I would worry about the implications of that for my immortal soul and my personal view of morality later. Right now I had work to do.

  The newspaper reports were so familiar to me that, by now, I could practically recite them by heart. I decided to tackle them in a different way, reading them backwards, hoping that seeing the words in a new way would show me something I missed. Old proofreader’s trick — the way to turn up something odd is to remove it from context.

  Reading backwards was slow going. Midway through the sheaf of papers, I tossed my glasses on the desk. My eyes were beginning to hurt, and I rubbed them and then swept my hand across my face. Time to take a break. I stood up, stretched my back, and crossed the room to pour myself a glass of Malmaison plonk. I smiled, remembering how I had asked the concierge about the strange name on the bottle of wine that greeted me on my arrival and where I might get more. He’d laughed, saying he’d send some more up whenever I wanted it, but that I’d do best not to ask for plonk in the local pub. Turns out “plonk” means cheap wine, and I can guarantee by taste and by the bill that the stuff I was swirling about in the bowl of the glass as I looked out over the darkening city of Belfast was anything but cheap. If nothing else, I was getting a course in Irish slang as a result of this expedition.

  I stood there for a long while as the lights came on and people hurried by on the sidewalk below, heading to dinner or a bit of last-minute shopping. I liked Belfast, in spite of its size. I would be sad to leave it, sadder still if I left in defeat. I watched a girl wearing a bright pink coat cross the street at the corner that I knew to be by the Albert Memorial clock tower. She hurried across, hugging her arms against the cold. A few snowflakes were beginning to fall. Time to get back to work.

  It was after midnight when I finished. Nothing had jumped out at me in the midst of the pages and pages of narrative. I still had the tox reports, the pictures, and the background clippings to go through.

  I decided to start with the clippings. Ben had done his usual overachieving job in putting together information about Fiona and about the murder. I decided to work backwards once again, taking the oldest clippings first. Bless his heart, Ben had printed them out for me, though I knew he would have preferred sending me a disc with all of them on it. He’d be a great one for a clipping service, I thought to myself, and wondered whether they still called them that in this day of electronics and bits and bytes.

  And there were plenty of clippings. I wondered how my son had found articles from various European newspapers, wondered again how he got them translated so quickly. Fiona had certainly gotten around, and a lot. And she loved the limelight. And more’s the curse — Eoin was right. She had been exceptionally beautiful.

  There were images of her from all over Europe, usually in elegant evening clothes and jewels. I noticed several photographs of her smoking a cigarette in a long, old-fashioned, but clearly expensive, holder. I wondered if she was consciously emulating Audrey Hepburn, as her pose was so similar to the iconic Breakfast at Tiffany’s image. Nasty habit, I thought, glossing over the fact that Eoin smoked a pipe.

  I was despairing of ever finding something worthwhile until I came across one story, filed from Amsterdam some five years prior. It had to do with the loss of some jewelry, which at the time had been in the care of her companion, one Deirdre Connor. The sister Moira Haggarty had mentioned, who left trailing in the wake of Fiona when she ran off with her Italian journalist.

  The famous and elusive Deirdre! The article said little about her. She still carried the Connor name, at least at that time, so I gathered that her marital fortunes were less than her employer’s. I could not imagine Fiona’s taking the loss of gems with any degree of equanimity. My guess was that she would have made short work of Deirdre. Time to set Ben on to a little more computer sleuthing.

  It was still early afternoon back home, and I caught Ben between classes. I told him what I needed, and he was back to me within the hour.

  “Deirdre Connor served two years in prison for the theft of jewelry from Fiona, Mom. And about six months after she was released, the jewelry was found by one of Fiona’s maids in a suitcase she was packing. Fiona apologized to Deirdre, but that’s not the best part. She had to repay insurance money she got when the stuff was stolen, with interest. She almost got prosecuted for insurance fraud herself. And, as far as I can tell, Deirdre Connor dropped off the face of the earth. Last known information was in London, and after that, no trace of her anywhere.”

  I mulled this bit of news over in my mind. “Do you think she’s dead?”

  “I can’t find any record of it. More like she’s just on the fringe of things. You have to be pretty mainstream — or a criminal — to have a cyber footprint. Maybe she is just obscure.”

  Obscure she might be, but she sure enough had a motive to kill Fiona. Maybe motives for murder ran in the Connor family.

  ***

  Sadie pulled up the files from Lucy’s jump drive in the quiet and solitude of her condo. She was still sensitive enough about her position, and just frightened enough of Dr. Wallace, that she didn’t want to risk looking at the information anywhere she was likely to be interrupted. Besides, the condo was comfortable beyond her wildest expectations. And posh, a far cry from the digs at the Center and worlds away from the intermittent clapboard home she had shared with her decidedly middle-class parents. Everything new, everything modern, clean, uncluttered, and upscale. She settled herself into the corner of the chaise that made up the end of the pale-gray, velvet sectional and arranged a gold pillow behind the small of her back. She canted her knees just enough to give her a good view of the screen, turned on the wall-mounted flat screen television for some background noise, and took a sip of wine from the glass on the side table before she began clicking through the information.

  That those children died of coniine poisoning, she knew, and there wasn’t much else to see in the reports, not even the one she had typed up for Dr. Wallace just before she was fired. She pulled up some information about hemlock on the internet, and it added nothing. She didn’t expect it to, but sometimes retracing steps helped her to find the missing ones. Not this time. It was a simple enough problem. Find the source of the poison, and it had to be in common between the kids and their grandmother. And it certainly wasn’t a commercial source. For one thing, there would be no way that poison hemlock would make its way into commercial food, and for another, this, as far as she could tell, was the extent of the cluster. Not even a search of poison control centers revealed any more recent cases of coniine poisoning.

  Ergo, the source had to be within the family, and with the history that Elsie Teague was a forager, odds are it came from her. That little tidbit she hadn’t known before; Dr. Wallace had made a note in the file, the day they had interviewed Sally Gleason. She hadn’t told Sadie, though. It wasn’t like Dr. Wallace to hold back information. Then again, Sadie hadn’t had a chance to see the file since she left. No harm, no foul, but it was good to know.

  Because there was no reason to suspect poisoning at first, thanks to her signing out the case, the police report on Elsie Teague was limited. By the time they got to check out her condo, her son was already cleaning it up and getting it ready for sale. It was a perfunctory report, not long on detail. But there were some photographs. They showed a cramped but tidy place, modest enough by ordinary standards, but one that would fetch half a million dollars. Not much there, just a couch and a couple of chairs, a rumpled bed, probably where they had found her dead. It was one of those Danish modern platform beds, with the side tables attached and a bookshelf in the headboard. The shelf was crammed with books, and the table held a glass, what looked like a few crumpled tissues and a square bottle alongside a spoon. Sadie frowned a bit. That was the detritus of a cold. No one had given her that information
when she fielded the case. Then she shrugged. It would not have mattered. Nothing to worry about in an old lady. She would have done the same thing, but she was beginning to appreciate Dr. Wallace’s attention to procedure. Even so, nothing much helpful here.

  There was another case, the other kid. Dr. Wallace had taken that one, so Sadie knew nothing about it. She read the report: not a spare word and not a detail missing. And not much to show why the child died, though with a history of vomiting and a fragile child with lipid disease, nothing to worry about. Except for that report of Lucy’s. There was no reason to find that much potassium in an injection port, and the report said the child received something through her IV just before she died.

  Sadie flipped to the medical records. No mention of adding potassium to the IV. No mention of medication administered, either. That was strange, but not unheard of. And if she recalled, the father had wigged out and held the nurse hostage until the local priest talked him down. That was front page news the next day. The article was in the file, too. She skimmed it and came to an abrupt halt midway through the first paragraph. The nurse held hostage was Mavis Butler. She knew Mavis. She was a regular at Proserpine. She and Mavis had even shared a celebratory glass of champagne the day that the referendum on assisted suicide passed.

  Suddenly, the potassium in the injection port was more than worrisome. Sadie closed the laptop, drained her wine glass, and got up from the sofa. It was still early in the evening, the night was clear, and the Gondola was running. A walk around town in Telluride sounded good to her, and maybe she’d stop by Proserpine just for good measure. The offices should be open until nine tonight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  January 23

  The car arrived right on time, seven forty-five. It wasn’t full light yet, but it wasn’t dark, either. I punched directions into my phone, set it into the holder conveniently provided by the rental company and Charles, remembered how to manage a stick shift, and took note of the sticker on the dash that reminded me to drive on the left side of the road. There were a few jerky moments, and I got a couple of honks before I got onto the motorway, but by the time I was out of Belfast, I was at home behind the wheel. Well, if not at home, at least not on probation.