The Oath

by John Lescroart

  But Glitsky had taken Hardy's information, then gone back himself to talk to Frank Husic. He considered that man's testimony to be unimpeachable, and Carla's time of death established. If Kensing hadn't been there at 10:45, he was innocent. He'd give a lot to know precisely where the doctor had been, but knew he wasn't likely to get it from any source, and certainly not from Marlene Ash. "Thanks for the heads-up," he told her. "You got anybody else you like?"

  "Not really, Abe. I'm talking to the accountant and maybe a couple of board members this afternoon. I've got to broaden the net and make some progress on the money side or Clarence is going to be unhappy. He's already going to be unhappy that his deal with Dismas got us nothing of any substance."

  "It got me something," Glitsky said ruefully. "I didn't arrest him, which is starting to look like a good idea."

  This was unarguable, and Marlene went on. "Well, anyway, I've subpoenaed all of their financial records for the past three years and we'll see who can explain them satisfactorily. I'm going to have the grand jury take the fraud issue head-on. Then maybe I'll get back to the murder indictment, but for now my priority "

  * * *

  "What are you guys talking about?"

  Bracco and Fisk weren't exactly talking. They'd come back and met at the hall after their respective interviews in the morning. The volume of their conversation out at their desks had pulled the lieutenant out of his office and his meeting with Ash.

  "Nothing, sir. Sorry." Darrel Bracco didn't want to fink on his partner, although he was plenty disappointed in him.

  "It didn't sound like nothing." Glitsky stood over their combined desk with the stoplight in the middle of it. He was looking down on them, one to the other.

  At last, Fisk caved. "Malachi Ross told me when he went home on the Tuesday night, but it was a different time than his wife had said."

  "So Harlen told Ross what she'd said," Bracco finished for him.

  "You told him?" Glitsky's voice was flat. Ash had come out and was standing behind him, shaking her head at these Keystones.

  Fisk nodded. "She said after midnight and he said ten o'clock. So he just said she was wrong. She'd made a mistake."

  "And then, the minute Harlen walked out the door, he called her." Bracco was appalled at his partner's error. "How much you want to bet?"

  "Easy, Darrel." Glitsky turned a surprisingly patient eye to Fisk. "Usually when you get contradictory statements from two witnesses, especially if they're closely related, like married, you don't want to tell the one what the other said until you can get them together and confront them with the contradiction. That can be instructive."

  "Yes, sir. I got that now. I made a mistake. Do you think he's called his wife?"

  "Absolutely," Bracco said.

  Ash spoke from behind Glitsky. "Do you have her number? You could call and ask her yourself."

  Fisk said he thought he'd try that. While he made the call, Bracco started to tell Glitsky about his interview with Brendan Driscoll. When Ash heard about the correspondence and computer files, she piped in, "What are all these papers? He never mentioned them when he was up before the grand jury."

  "He told me you didn't ask about them."

  "How could I? I didn't know they existed outside of the company computers. What did he do, steal them?"

  "I gathered he e-mailed them to himself before he got fired."

  "So he stole them. Are they still at his house?"

  "I got that impression, the disks anyway."

  Ash turned to Glitsky. "We need that stuff, Abe."

  "Jeff Elliot's already got it," Bracco offered.

  "Forget it," Glitsky said. "He's a reporter. We'll never see it."

  "So we'll go for Driscoll's originals," Ash said. "Where are your warrant forms? You keep 'em up here?"

  "You might not even need them," Bracco told her. "Driscoll's just looking for a way that he can disrupt things at Parnassus. He's bitter. He wants to get back at people, especially people who made life hard on Markham."

  Ash nodded, but told them to get a warrant anyway. Fisk came back over to the knot of them, dejected. "She didn't admit he called her, but she said she remembered wrong and changed her mind. She was glad I called. She was going to call me." He looked mournfully around him. "Ten o'clock."

  "He called her," Bracco snapped.

  "It doesn't matter." Glitsky was in a fatalistic frame of mind after Kensing. "The wife wouldn't have testified at trial against her husband anyway. We haven't lost anything. Not like with Kensing."

  The two inspectors shot glances at each other. "What about Kensing?" Bracco asked.

  Again, Ash stepped in. "You can take him off your list. He has an alibi for Carla's murder. I was just telling Abe."

  This brought them all to silence, which Bracco broke. "So it's all coming down to Carla?"

  Glitsky nodded. "Looks like. Is there anybody left without an alibi? What about Driscoll?"

  "I asked him this morning," Bracco said. "He might have been talking on the phone."

  "To who?"

  "His partner, Roger. I was going to check his phone records. It's on my list."

  * * *

  After a moment, Fisk perked up. "I don't know if you've heard, Lieutenant, but we've made some progress on the car."

  Hardy should have been elated. After all, his client was no longer a suspect. He'd remained on the fifth floor, eschewing an opportunity to visit with either Glitsky or Jackman, waiting on a bench outside the Police Commissioner's Hearing Room until Kensing had come out. Eric told him how it had gone, which was pretty much exactly as Hardy had predicted.

  The two men had walked up to John's for a celebration lunch but it had turned out to be a sober affair, in all senses. Hardy made a few—he thought—subtle attempts to get Eric to open up about his girlfriend. How had Judith Cohn gotten along with Markham? With Ross? With all the Parnassus problems, monetary and otherwise, with which Kensing had such difficulty? What were their plans together, if any?

  Eric was reasonably forthcoming. She'd only been on staff at Portola for a year after her residency at USC and internship at Johns Hopkins, then two four-month stints—one in Africa and one in South America—with Me´dicins San Frontie`res.

  "You know, Doctors Without Borders, although she always gives it the French reading, posters in her room and her bumper sticker even. She's proud of her languages, French and Spanish. And she's a fanatic about the organization, really. I think she's got me half-convinced to go over with her next time—it's Nigeria this summer—although God knows there's enough to do here in this coun try. But if Parnassus does let me go andmy kids, I don't know how they'd handle it. Remember when decisions used to be easy?"

  After they said good-bye, Hardy stood in the sunshine on Ellis Street, about midway between his office and the Chronicle building. It should be over, he knew, but somehow it wasn't. This wasn't the familiar emotional letdown after the conclusion of a trial. There was no conclusion here, not yet.

  Someone had murdered Tim Markham and his family. Someone had murdered a succession of patients at Portola.

  And he still had his deal with Glitsky. They were sharing their discovery, and he was privy to knowledge that Abe did not share. It rankled and left him feeling somehow in his friend's debt, which was absurd. Hardy had, if anything, done Glitsky a big favor.

  But whatever the complications, he knew that he was too involved to quit, even if there was no one left to defend.

  It couldn't be the end. It wasn't over.

  PART FOUR

  33

  There was no reason now for Jeff Elliot to use any of the dirt that Driscoll had supplied on Eric Kensing. If he wasn't any longer suspected of killing Markham and his family, then he was a private person with his own private problems, and they were not the stuff of news—at least not the kind of news that made its way into "CityTalk."

  Hardy sat in Elliot's cubicle, the stack of paper Driscoll had provided on the rolling table in front of him. He flipped thr
ough the pages slowly, one at a time over the course of the afternoon, while Jeff toiled on his next column. It was really a hodgepodge of data. The letters to Kensing that Elliot had shown Hardy the other day, for example, occurred over the course of several years, and were widely separated within the printed documents. Likewise, the memos to Ross and the board on various issues, including Baby Emily and the Lopez boy, occurred in chronological order. Hardy was finding that only a careful reading of all the documents related to any one issue would lead to any real sense of the gravity of the thing over time.

  There were at least a hundred memos to file, as well. Formal documentation—probably dictated to Driscoll—of various meetings and decisions. Nothing that struck him as new or important. More interesting to Hardy, although far more cryptic, were the thirty or forty shorthand reminders and comments that Markham had probably typed to himself. It was obvious that he believed he could write in a secure—probably a passworded—document, but that Driscoll had breached that security and gotten access. But try as he might, Hardy couldn't make much out of them.

  Markham's early memos to Portola's administration on Lopez were mostly concerned with the facts of the situation. They were about insurance considerations and a litany of medical explanations of specific decisions that might mitigate their liability in the inevitable lawsuit.

  Several memos, both to file and to the Physicians' Group, explored the culpability of a Dr. Jadra, who had been the first physician to examine Ramiro Lopez at the clinic. Somehow, Hardy gathered, it was determined that Jadra's actions were not negligent. The boy's fever had been mild on that first visit. The throat infection had not yet progressed to the point where a reasonable diagnostician would necessarily prescribe antibiotics or even order a strep test. Further, Jadra did not note the cut on Ramiro's lip in his file at all, and when questioned about it later, had no memory of it. These Jadra memos struck Hardy as interesting because he could read the obvious subtext: Markham was looking for a scapegoat, and the case against Jadra would not be as clear-cut as that against Cohn. So these Jadra documents had, to Hardy, an odd, defensive character.

  By contrast, when Markham finally recommended that they prepare an 805 on Cohn—which went on her permanent record with the state medical board and the National Practitioner Data Bank—the letter was sharply worded and extremely critical: " Dr. Cohn's inability to recognize the early signs of necrotizing fasciitis and her failure to recommend highly aggressive treatment was surely the primary factor contributing to the patient's death. By the time he was admitted to the ICU, the disease had progressed to the point where even the most active intervention would probably not have been efficacious. We recommend that Portola suspend Dr. Cohn's clinical privileges for thirty days, that you submit an 805 report on this incident, as required, and that you conduct a full enquiry to determine the advisability of Dr. Cohn's continued employ within the Parnassus Physicians' Group."

  Hardy knew what Markham was doing here—trying to distance himself and the hospital from Judith's failure to make an early diagnosis. Again, this decision was about insurance, about getting sued, about the money. From Kensing's perspective, though admittedly biased, the real ultimate culprit in this tragedy had been Malachi Ross, pulling the strings and denying the needed care from on high. Instead, the opprobrium was falling most heavily, and solely, on a relatively newly hired, young female staffer. Even if Judith might have done a better job with the early diagnosis, it was clearly unfair to single her out as the reason the boy had died. Many people contributed, as did the corporate culture, and Hardy thought the whole thing stunk.

  It did, however, provide a solid motive for Judith to have hated Markham.

  He turned the page and stared uncomprehendingly at the next. Something about Ross he was sure. The initials MR. Then "Priv. Invest." But did this refer to a private investment in one of the drug companies with whom Parnassus did business, or to a private investigator that Markham might hire to keep tabs on his medical director? There was simply no way to know.

  He went on to the next page.

  * * *

  "I do not remember." Rajan Bhutan shook his head sadly.

  Fisk had had a few ideas he wanted to pursue about the car and some other things, so Glitsky had asked Darrel Bracco if he wanted to sit in with him while he talked to Rajan Bhutan, who'd volunteered to come down to the hall in the early afternoon. Nevertheless, Bhutan seemed nervous and reluctant when he showed up punctually for the interview. He asked Glitsky several times if he needed a lawyer, and once if Glitsky was going to arrest him. Glitsky reassured him that he was free to leave at any time. No one was arresting anyone today.

  Bhutan told Glitsky he did not like it that people thought he might have killed someone. Glitsky told him they just wanted to clear up some things he'd said before, maybe get a few more facts. But of course (Glitsky reiterated) he was welcome to call an attorney at any point if he wanted to spend the money.

  But now with no attorney, Bhutan was saying he didn't remember the day after Christmas. "You don't remember if you worked at all that day?" Bracco was doing bad cop. Glitsky had already made friends with Bhutan in their earlier interview, and preferred to leave things that way.

  "I'm sure there is a record of it," Bhutan responded, wanting to be helpful. "You could check with personnel."

  "We've already done that, Rajan, and they tell us you were working that day, and it just seems like you would have remembered. Do you know why? Do you remember Shirley Watrous? She died that day. She was murdered on that day."

  Glitsky sat at the head of the table, kitty-corner to both of them. He held up a hand, restraining Bracco for Bhutan's benefit. "Do you remember anything specific about Shirley Watrous, Rajan? Was she a difficult patient, something like that?"

  Bhutan hung his head, then raised it again with an effort. "I do remember that name. She was, no, not difficult. There really is no one more difficult than another in the intensive care unit. They are all just people who are suffering."

  "The suffering bothers you, doesn't it, Rajan?" Bracco was sitting across from him. There was a video camera masked in an air vent mounted in the corner on the ceiling, an unseen tape running under the table.

  "Yes. It's why I became a nurse. My wife suffered terribly before she died, and I learned that I could help."

  Glitsky poured more water from the pitcher into Bhutan's paper cup. "Did you ever think you could help patients more by putting them out of their misery?"

  "No. I have never done that kind of thing. Not one time."

  "Never pulled the plug on anyone when it was clear they were going to die? Anything like that?" Glitsky asked gently.

  Bhutan sipped from his cup, shook his head. "No. Always, that is the doctor's decision. I am there only to help, not to decide. If I have a question, I ask a doctor." Again, he drank some water. "And I never know when people are going to die, Lieutenant. No one knows that, not even the doctors. No one but God. In these years I have worked at the ICU, I have seen people come in and think they won't make it to the night. But then, a week later they sit up and can go home. It is just what happens."

  Bracco jumped all over that. "Well, Shirley Watrous didn't just happen. Something happened to her. Same as with Marjorie Loring. And you were on duty for both of them. What do you have to say about that?"

  Glitsky leaned in helpfully. "Maybe they were belligerent, Rajan. They didn't want you poking at them, changing their beds. Maybe they were making it worse for the others in the room."

  Bhutan looked from one inspector to the other. "I don't know what to say. What do you want me to say?"

  "You are the common denominator on both of the shifts where these women died, Rajan." Bracco thought they were getting close, and his intensity came through. "We've got another nine or ten people who died in the ICU, and you were on for all of them, as well. If you were sitting here where we are, what would you think?"

  He brought his hands to the black circles under his eyes. "I would think I must ha
ve killed them myself." His eyes sought each of theirs in turn. "But I swear to you, that isn't true."

  Bracco threw Glitsky a quick look, then struck in a loud voice. "Are you expecting us to believe you had nothing to do with the deaths of these women? And the others? Who else was there, Rajan? Who else had any chance?"

  "I don't know. I don't know who would do this? There must be a record of who else was there. Some doctor, perhaps. Even a janitor or sometimes a security guard. They come and go, you understand."

  Glitsky reached over and touched Bhutan's sleeve. "Do you remember anyone, Rajan?"

  Bracco slapped at the table, then stood up, knocking his chair over behind him as he did so. "There's no phantom janitor or doctor, Rajan! There's only you, don't you understand? We have your records. You have been on duty for every death we know of, even Tim Markham's."