by Cat Connor
Mostly boring stuff, regarding why they were in the ER, but I began to notice comments from nursing staff regarding each patient’s behavior.
Holy crap.
Each and every one said the same thing. Uncooperative. Difficult. Demanding. I gave the comments some thought. Okay, so sick or injured people can be a bit cranky and snippy. I’m no picnic myself when sick or hurt, but I tend to take my annoyance out on those closest to me and it comes off as contrariness. Trust me, contrariness is an okay character trait compared with what I was reading in the files in front of me. I was getting a picture in my mind of some very difficult and downright mean patients.
“How unusual is it to see the sort of comments I’m seeing here?” I asked Kurt while showing him a few of the files with comments marked.
“Not usual at all.”
“Every file has a comment regarding each patient’s behavior in the emergency room. And they all behaved badly.”
“We need to compare files of people who are still alive to see if this is relevant.”
“Let’s go.”
Looked pretty relevant to me: Every file? Someone doesn’t like the grumpy patients.
I gathered up the files and dumped them into my bag.
“Game face,” Kurt whispered as we left the safety of our room.
I took his hand and grinned. “How’s this?”
“You might ease up on the smile. The brief was honeymoon not loony tune. You look demented.”
Eighteen
Living On A Prayer
Grant wasn’t in his office when we arrived. Didn’t take long to find him. He was in the ER doing what doctors do.
Chaos spun all around me. We stood aside, almost hugging the wall, while people moved with haste in all directions. Kurt craned his neck to see into the triage area. A sliding door next to the triage window opened and closed, letting gurneys and staff through.
“Wait here. Something’s going on.”
“Okay.”
From where I stood I could see into the waiting room. It looked full. A quick head count put the number of occupants at twenty. Some looked quite ill, others injured, and the rest could’ve been support people.
Twenty.
That’s a lot of people. Looking at the ill and wounded, I mentally cut out five of them. How could a roomful of people disappear?
I hooked my phone out of my bag. And called Sam.
“It’s me,” I said, leaning back on the wall.
“Chicky. Problem?”
“Fifteen is a lot of people to disappear all at once.”
“It is.”
“So maybe they didn’t. Maybe whoever it is kills over time and keeps them on ice?”
“I don’t want to find the meat locker,” Sam said.
“Me neither. See if you can locate it before I’m done down here?”
Sam chuckled. “See what I can do, Chicky.”
“Use your super meat-discovery powers.”
I hung up.
Kurt hustled over. “I’m going to wade in here and help Grant. They’ve got a multi-vehicle crash coming in.”
“Can you do that? Don’t you need to hold a Virginia medical license?”
Kurt smiled. “I do. I’m an FBI asset and thanks to them I am licensed to practice in all fifty states and our territories.”
Of course he is; that’s why O’Hare wanted him to join Delta in the first place.
“What can I do?”
He pressed a key into my hand. “You have the key to Grant’s office. I’ll be by when I can.”
“Awesome.”
I’m useless because no one knows I’m FBI. So I can’t go asking tons of questions of staff, or can I?
I headed back to Grant’s office and let myself in.
How did they die?
Making myself comfortable in Grant’s chair, I spread the files over the desk and took over the place. The hunt was on for the causes of death. All we had was unexpected death following illness. They had to have died of something. A complication? Another illness? Heart attack? Brain freaking fart? There had to be something.
The most recent of the deaths were still in the hospital morgue, the other bodies had gone to a county morgue for autopsy. There were no autopsy reports attached to the files. The notable missing item? A police report. It made me wonder if sudden death within a hospital had to be reported, or was that only if foul play was suggested? But Grant was suspicious. Why not involve local cops?
I picked up the phone and called my trusty old friend Kev out in Mauryville. A police perspective wouldn’t hurt.
“Hey, Kev, it’s—”
He laughed. “You think I don’t know! How are ya, kid?”
“Good. Got a hypothetical for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Say a bunch of people died unexpectedly in a hospital over a period of three months, and a doctor suspected something wasn’t right, in what circumstances would he fail to contact local police?”
I could hear Kevin muttering to himself before he answered. “Seems to me that a doc would have to have a very good reason to keep that out of local hands.”
“Say what?”
“How hypothetical is this?”
“Let’s just say I can’t use any names and leave it at that.”
“Six months ago, Mrs. Abernathy died in Stonewall Jackson Hospital. Her daughter told me she was due for discharge the next day.”
“What’d she die of?” I scrabbled through files looking for the Abernathy one. It wasn’t there. But all the files I had were recent, within the last three months. Could this have gone on longer?
“She was an old duck, about eighty-four. They said heart failure. Funny thing is she wasn’t in for her heart. She had asthma.”
“Gimme a date of death,” I said, picking up a pen. In the back of my mind I cottoned on to the eighty-four and had to accept it may have been heart failure and unrelated. He gave me the date, spelled out her name, and even supplied her date of birth. I wrote it all on a Post-it note and thanked the gods it was not blue or yellow. More people should use neon green. “I’ll look into it.”
“As to why someone wouldn’t report it to local police? Could be the person they suspect has connections to the local police or could be that this is a small town and everyone knows everyone.”
“Or?”
“Or, they don’t want everyone knowing that people are dying. Think about it, how many people live in our little county?”
“About twenty thousand.”
“Give or take, now; that hospital is vital. They fly patients out to Richmond if and when they have to, but if the brown stuff hits the spinning thing down here … first port of call is the hospital,” Kevin said.
“You think the hypothetical doctor is protecting the population by not letting this out?”
“No, I think he’s protecting his own ass, but he’s convinced himself he’s protecting the population who need to use the hospital. People die – fact of life. People die needlessly and all of a sudden every death is under the microscope.”
“Small town, everyone knows everyone … then why haven’t people started putting two and two together?”
“Because people die, Ellie. Because it all seems quite reasonable when it’s explained by a doctor you trust.”
“I’m going to go find out about Mrs. Abernathy. She was from Mauryville?” I stopped talking and let the images form. “Abernathys lived by you, Kev?”
“They did. Old man Abernathy still does. One of the kids came home, she’s a nurse, and she takes care of him now. Real tragic type woman she is. Her only kid was killed by a drunk driver.”
“When did she come back?”
“Maybe a year ago.”
“You think she’d mind if I dropped by for a chat?”
“Sure she wouldn’t.”
“Okay, what’s her name?”
I could hear Kev thinking. Then he resorted to flipping pages in his notebook. “I got it here somewhere; she
came in to make a complaint against a young’un who’s been tearing up and down the road out of town like a rally driver.” More pages flipped. “Here we go – Dionne Bailey.”
“Did she go to school in Lexington?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll get on with this, um, hypothetical case here.”
“Keep in touch.”
I hung up. The files beckoned but so did coffee. I needed coffee. The coffee pot was empty. I grabbed the key and my wallet; time to find the hospital cafeteria. As I wandered through the building, hoping to smell coffee and be led by my nose, I wondered how good a place the cafeteria would be for gossip. Small hospital, small town, people like to talk.
Around the next corner I smelled the tell-tale aroma of fresh coffee and followed it to a small cafeteria. To get to the counter I walked past about twelve tables. Most of which were empty. But I noticed three nurses sitting in the far corner. There was a table in front of them, empty. I mentally marked it as mine. A few other tables were occupied by visitors or doctors. I bought a coffee and a muffin then sat near the nurses. I could hear their conversation. Small talk. A few comments on various patients, no names mentioned. Nothing untoward said. The comments were nice ones. The vibe wasn’t one of a group of killers or even a single killer. They were colleagues. They cared about their patients and they were genuine in wanting to help. I downed my coffee and tossed the Styrofoam cup in the trash can on my way out.
As I glanced back over my shoulder I noticed a doctor watching me. It could’ve been an indication of recognition on her face. There was a definite hint of something.
There was a nurse in the corridor by Grant’s office door. I stopped her.
“Where would I find my patient records?”
She smiled. “Records are kept in the basement, you can take the stairs.” She pointed down the hall to a doorway. “We keep records for fifteen years; after that they’re destroyed or removed by the patient, assuming they’re no longer needed.”
“Thanks.”
I let myself into the office once she’d gone and took the piece of paper with the Abernathy woman’s details on it. Something told me that her death was connected to the recent deaths.
It was a slow walk down the stairs, to the first basement level. Stairs carried on. I read the sign telling me the morgue was farther down.
A smiling man greeted me from behind a counter as I swung through the double doors into a well-lit, warm basement room. Beyond him rows of shelving stretched back toward the wall. The room was deep and long. Lots of files were crammed into the extensive shelves.
“Can I help?”
“I hope so,” I replied. “My aunt died here six months ago and I was wondering if I could pick up her records?”
The lines around his eyes softened. “I’ll see if the records are here.”
I gave him her name, date of birth, and date of death. The man with the warm smile disappeared in between rows. He came back holding a thick file.
The file thumped onto the counter under its own weight.
“This is it. I can’t release it without ID.” He sounded apologetic.
“I never thought of that,” I said with a shrug. “I’m here with a friend. She had an accident. So while she is being taken care of in the emergency room, I thought I’d come down and get them. You know, to save my uncle the trip. It’s quite a way from Mauryville.”
“Sure.”
I turned to leave. “That’ll teach me for leaving my purse behind.”
“Hang on, miss.” With a glance over my shoulder I saw the file being held out. “Take it. Your aunt died, we don’t need her file.”
“Really?”
“What harm can it do?”
I smiled, thanked him, and hurried away with the bulky file under my arm.
An hour later I was convinced Mrs. Abernathy had been murdered by the person responsible for the more recent deaths. There was no autopsy. I knew we had to go back over rosters for the entire year. The whole thing became a mind-numbing exercise in following a paper trail made of breadcrumbs. Grant had a large whiteboard on the back wall of his office. I hunted through his drawers for pens. With his Post-it notes I labeled all the files in chronological order, by death date, earliest to latest. Writing the numbers on the board showed the emergence of a pattern. Deaths from six months to six days ago.
Six.
Every death occurred on a day with a six but one. The one that wasn’t a six was the sixth day of the week. I grabbed my phone from my bag and opened the calendar. Today was the sixteenth.
Go back a year.
I wrote notes on the board. With my phone open I started scrolling back, noting all the dates we had to check. Every Saturday; every sixth, sixteenth, twenty-sixth. My feeling was that tracing the deaths back would give us a starting point.
A trigger: Something so horrific that it caused this spate of deaths. The more I looked at the list the more I thought the event happened in the emergency room.
Armed with the list of dates to check for deaths, I hurried back to the ER to find Kurt. It’d been at least three hours. There were more people than ever in the waiting room. Triage was separated from the waiting room by a reception desk and that was where I went.
I introduced myself as Mrs. Henderson and asked if my husband was free. The best thing was I didn’t even flinch. It was no different from convincing the records keeper that I was Mrs. Abernathy’s niece. The receptionist introduced herself as Katrina. “I’ll buzz you in; you can sit with me until he’s free.”
Anything was better than sitting in the waiting room with the sick and wounded. I’m not germ-phobic by any means, but no need to tempt fate.
Katrina buzzed me in through triage. She gave me a chair and a coffee, and settled in for some gossip.
Her phone rang. “Hello, this is Katrina speaking. You’ve reached emergency. How may I help?”
Moments later she pressed a button and hung up only to have the phone ring again.
I was fascinated by her telephone voice. I’d heard that voice so many times from so many places. My mind began to wander off alone, accompanied by the lilting telephone voice of Katrina.
“Hello, this is Katrina speaking, how can I help?”
Was every receptionist I’d ever met called Katrina? Or did they all go to specialist reception school to learn to inflect their words like that? I listened as Katrina put the caller through to someone else then hung up.
A lull ensued followed by a question directed at me.
“You look just like that woman who is dating Rowan Grange. I saw them in a magazine the other day. He is so hot. Are you related?”
“To Grange? No.”
“Silly, to that woman. She’s an FBI agent or something. They said that on the television, that Entertainment Today program.”
Ah, real news.
“Oh, her,” I replied thanking the stars that acting was all in a day’s work. “She looks nothing like me.”
“She does, you could be twins.” Katrina bowed her head close to mine. “You can tell me, are you sisters?”
“No, wish I was. Grange isn’t bad on the eye, decent voice too. He’d be okay as a brother-in-law.”
She considered my response. “Pity; free concert tickets would be okay. How long have you been married to Kurt?”
Kurt? Time to take more notice. Katrina looked about Kurt’s age.
How long had we been married, what had he told people? Crap.
“Not long, we’re on our honeymoon.” I rolled my eyes. “Never marry a doctor.”
She smiled, batted her eye-lashes and replied, “He’s quite a catch. We all knew, all of us, that he and Grant would go far.”
Problem is he didn’t go far enough, because he came back.
“We?”
“I was in their class at high school.”
It has been my experience of high school that people from high school can turn out to be malicious killers later in life. Imagined wrongs. Mispla
ced devotion. I started to look at Katrina in a different light.
“Did you know Kurt well?”
She came over all wistful. “He was the best looking boy in my year.” Then it all changed. “I didn’t know him well at all.”
Something in her voice gave me pause.
I knew of Kurt’s many girlfriends in college, but suppose it started earlier than that? Nothing for it but to spring it on her.
“How long did you date?”
She shuffled papers, her cheeks flushed as she moved everything to one side then back again.
“Not long. A couple of months.”
“What happened?”
“He went away to college and never came back.” Her voice perked up. “I married Chuck Sackett. He’s a plumber. He has his own plumbing business.”
Plumbing.
The police said a plumber had been to my house the day it exploded, even though I hadn’t called one. I made a mental note to investigate the plumber thing myself.
“Do you have children?”
She shook her head. “We have not been blessed that way. I’m hoping that this round of treatment will be successful.”
“Fertility treatment?” I felt stupid as soon as the words left my mouth but I ploughed on. “Here in town?”
“Yes, at the clinic.”
Such a small place, yet there is a fertility clinic. What was Grant’s wife’s name? Lisa? Kim? Candy?
Kim.
“Kim works there, Grant’s wife,” I said inclining my head a little.
Katrina smiled. “Yes, she does.” Katrina dropped her voice to a whisper laden with intrigue, “It must be hell for her.”
“Why is that?”
“She can’t have children,” she murmured, closing a file and sliding it into a tray on her desk.
“Maybe they don’t want children,” I offered. My comment met with a horrified glare.
“Of course they do, they’re married. Everyone wants children. Why would you get married if not to have children?”
Wow. Such a strong reaction. I decided to keep my views on children to myself. Katrina wasn’t the person with whom to discuss my decision not to procreate.
