"This is not the way they do things in the school system," Lucas said. "They’ve got a whole bureaucratic procedure they follow, and it’s all very routine. This was strange, right from the start. I don’t think it was a teacher at all. Could you think, really hard, about who it might be?"
"Okay, okay… but you’re scaring me. Why?"
"Because it might be related to something else. Anyway, think about it. If you come up with anything, you’ve got my number."
"Okay." She stepped close and gave him a hug. "Thanks."
Traffic was beginning to ease as he headed south, down to Dakota County, finally to MercySouth. He went in through the emergency entrance, was directed by a nurse to Records, and found a dark-haired young woman sitting in a pool of light from a desk lamp, in an otherwise dark room full of file cabinets and computers. Her feet up next to a computer, she was engrossed in a Carl Hiaasen novel. A stack of what looked like thick textbooks sat on the floor.
"Good book?" he asked in the silence.
She jumped, turned, saw him, looked down at the book, and said, "Yes, as a matter of fact." She looked at the photo on the back cover. "And this Hiaasen is a yummy little piece of crumb cake, if I do say so myself… You’d be Officer Davenport, and you need some records."
"That’s right."
"I’m supposed to Xerox your credential," she said. She went for the double entendre: "You’ll hardly feel a thing."
"Young women these days," Lucas clucked. He gave her his ID, she xeroxed it, and said, "There’s not much in the computer file-mostly just the bare bones. If you want to look at her actual file, we don’t have the paper anymore, but it’s on fiche."
"I’d like that, if I could."
"Sure." She found the right fiche, set him up with a reader, and went back to the novel.
Thefile was short, and echoed the Oxford doctor’s report of symptoms on George Lamb. Amelia Lamb suffered from flulike symptoms-gastric discomfort, sporadic vomiting. She saw the doctor twice, the visits two weeks apart. The discomfort had increased in the two weeks, and he ordered a number of tests. He noted that her blood pressure was high and that she had been asked to come in for a series of blood pressure tests, but there was no indication that any blood pressure medication had been prescribed. Four days after the second visit, she was brought to the hospital by ambulance, and was reported dead on arrival. The record noted that the daughter reported that she’d been suffering chest pains but had refused to come to the hospital because of cost, and she’d called only after her mother had collapsed.
"Relative reported that final collapse was accompanied by severe chest pains and rapid loss of consciousness. Myocardial infarction indicated." There was no mention of a rash.
Lucas looked at the woman with the book: "Is there a doctor around that I could talk to? Who’d have a little time?"
"I’m a fourth-year med student," the woman said. "What’s the question?"
"Look at this blood pressure," Lucas said. "Should she have been on medication?"
The woman bent over the screen, read the report, and said, "She would now. That’s definitely way high. But back then, the drugs weren’t so good. You’d have to talk to somebody older, who’d remember. But back then, she might not have been."
"All right: then look at this. On her second visit, they do some tests. But the tests never show up in the records."
The woman bent over the screen again, skimming through the records: "You know what?" she said finally. "It looks like she died before the tests could get back. So when they got back, they probably just tossed them."
"Huh. And the body was sent directly out to a funeral home."
"Yup."
"Why wouldn’t they do an autopsy?"
"Again, they didn’t do them so often back then. Not for hospital deaths. And, uh, you’d have to keep this under your hat… or at least not say I told you. I’ve noticed this in other records…"
"Sure."
"You see this funeral home?" She tapped the screen. "The predecessor organization to this hospital, which was called Dakota Mothers of Mercy, had a deal with the funeral home. If the relatives didn’t express a preference, they’d send the bodies out to this place, and the hospital would get a… consideration."
"A kickback."
"An emolument. If they sent them into Hennepin, for an autopsy, the body was up for grabs."
"So there would be a bias against autopsies," Lucas said.
"Unnecessary autopsies."
"You shoulda been a lawyer," Lucas said.
"Not enough money in it." The woman tapped the screen: "Here’s something else for you. The insurance company called about it. That’s the code for Prudential."
"They called?"
"Yup. That’s what that is-the files were sent out in response to a request from Prudential."
"They send them out to Prudential, but they’re gonna make me get a subpoena?"
"This was a long time ago," the woman said. "Things were really different."
The woman went back to the novel while Lucas made notes. When he was finished, he shut down the screen and gave her the fiche. "Thank you very much," he said.
She looked up from the desk. "Do you think if I, like, xeroxed my breasts and sent a copy to Hiaasen with my phone number, he’d call me up?"
"Certainly worth a try," Lucas said. "In fact, I’d recommend that you do it. How else will you know? If you don’t, you could be like two ships passing in the dark."
"Cops are weird," she said. But as Lucas left, she was looking at the copying machine.
Lucas drove toward home, thinking it all over: he’d call Prudential in the morning, hoping that they’d still have a record of the call. In any case, they must have paid somebody some money, if they bothered to make the call. He’d bet that Audrey was the recipient.
As he crossed the Mendota Bridge, he noticed, for the second or third time, that there was no noise in the background of his brain: no chattering. He’d caught himself whistling again. In the last twenty-four hours, he’d gotten thoroughly laid, hugged by Helen Bell, and double entendred by a nice-looking medical student.
"Glacier’s breaking up," he said aloud. "Ice is going out."
He wasn’t sure what it meant, but it felt right.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Sherrill saw him walking in, came down to meet him, took his hand. "Can I take you to dinner tomorrow night?"
"Sure. But things are starting to cook with Audrey McDonald. Shouldn’t mess us up, but if something comes up…" He was fumbling with his keys, opened the office door. She stepped in behind him.
"Tell me about it," she said. "About Audrey." He told her, and she said, "Goddamnit. If we weren’t sleeping together, you could just come down and tell Frank that you need me to work on this, and I’d get another neat case to work on. Now, we’d sorta have to jump through our asses."
"Nothing happening yet, anyway," he said.
"Well, if you’re going out to shoot somebody, call me," she said, as she went out the door.
"Do that."
Three calls: to Prudential, to the doctor who signed the death certificate, and to the funeral home that handled Amelia Lamb’s body.
Prudential was cooperative, but the right guy would have to get back.
The doctor was cooperative, but had no memory of the event at all. "I was doing a surgical residency and working part-time as an emergency room doc," he said. "I worked emergency rooms for seven years and must’ve signed five hundred of those things. Maybe a thousand. I’m sorry, but I just don’t remember."
The funeral home was confused, but a woman with a quavery, elderly voice finally found the record: Amelia Lamb had been cremated.
"Shit," Lucas said aloud.
"I beg your pardon?"
The Prudential guy called back a half hour later, as Lucas was pulling together records on the murders proposed by Helen Bell, as well as the two proposed by Annette Ingall.
"We paid sixty-four hundred dollars on Georg
e Lamb, which was not an inconsiderable sum at the time; and then four and a half years later, we paid fifteen thousand on Amelia Lamb. That insurance policy had been in effect only three years, which was probably why we called the hospital on it," the Prudential man said.
"Who was beneficiary on the Amelia Lamb policy?"
"Uh, let’s see… this is an older form… Um, an Audrey Lamb. Apparently her daughter."
"Not Audrey and Helen?"
"No, just an Audrey."
"How about on George Lamb?"
"That was… Amelia."
"Huh. Did Amelia Lamb have to take a physical?"
"Um… yup. Passed okay."
"Anything about high blood pressure?"
"Nope. But this form isn’t specific-you’d have to see the original doctor’s report, and that was so long ago…"
"Do you have the doc’s name?"
"Yup."
But the doctor was dead. His son, a dentist, said his father’s records had been transferred to other doctors when he gave up his practice, and records not transferred had been stored for ten years, then destroyed.
"Shit."
"I beg your pardon?"
Lucas went back to the records for an hour, and finally came to a push-comes-to-shove point. If Audrey was guilty of all of this, then she must have killed O’Dell. But according to the investigative records, signed off by Franklin and Sloan, she left the building before O’Dell was killed. That was confirmed: she logged out of the building at 10:53. Two people visiting their son in the building, who had logged out after her, confirmed that they had left just as a Roseanne rerun was ending. Nightline ended a couple of minutes before eleven, and they were shown as logging out at eleven, while O’Dell was confirmed killed at 11:02.
It was possible, of course, that Audrey was a master burglar and that she had some way of getting into a building with a security desk in the lobby. Or that she had somehow obtained a key card for the elevator. But the first of those possibilities seemed laughable, while the second was only barely reasonable-she wouldn’t have had much time to plan the killing of O’Dell, unless the killing was part of a long-range plan.
He thought about that for a moment. Maybe she did have a long-range plan. Maybe she had access to everybody she might ever need to kill. Then he shook his head. Couldn’t think that way. If she was working off a long-range plan, which had somehow involved getting home keys for all her possible victims, then she was a perfect killer and they were out of luck.
He glanced at his watch, punched up his computer, and wrote a memo, with copies to Frank Lester, head of the investigative division, and Rose Marie Roux.
Halfway through, a sheriff’s deputy called from Itasca County. "You called yesterday about the Baird case?"
"Yeah, thanks for calling back," Lucas said. "How well do you know the case?"
"I was lead investigator," the deputy said. "I pretty much know it all."
"I understand it was a firebombing," Lucas said. "A Molotov cocktail."
"Yeah, that’s right. A mix of gas and oil in a gallon jug," the deputy said.
"Was there anything weird about the bottle?" Lucas asked.
After a moment of pregnant silence, the deputy said, "Like what?"
"Like scoring? Like with a glass cutter?"
Another beat. Then, "How’n the hell did you know about that? We never put it in the report…"
When he was done with the memos, Lucas printed them and walked them down to Roux’s office and left them with the secretary. Homicide was just down the hall, so he stopped by.
Sherrill was at her desk: "Lunch?"
She was sitting next to Sloan, who was eating a corned beef sandwich. "If you don’t think people’ll think you’re fucking me," she said, just loud enough for Sloan to hear.
Sloan never flinched. "Let’s go," Lucas said. And to Sloan: "Have you got an hour, in an hour or so? To go over to O’Dell’s place, and look around?"
"Sure."
Lucas and Sherrill walked down the street to a cop hangout, got sandwiches, and Sherrill said, "I hope I can get past this wise-mouth stuff with you. I’ve been a wise-ass ever since we got together, and I’m having a hard time getting off that wavelength."
"I’ll recite you a poem sometime," Lucas said. "It makes women feel all gushy and tender; they roll right over on their backs."
"You just did it to me."
"What?"
"Wise-assed me. I heard you read poetry. I always thought it was neat. Now you wise-assed it."
"Yeah." He looked up at her, serious now. "I’m sorry I wise-assed it. I do like poetry, and I do like reading some of it to women."
"Say a poem to me."
He thought, and then said, slowly, " ‘It was Din, Din, Din you limpin’ lump of-’ "
"Get the fuck out of here," she said. "You did it again."
"We gotta do something about this," he said, grinning at her. "I really am serious. We’ve got to have at least one honest talk. Penalties for any wise-ass remarks."
"Tomorrow night. For dinner."
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
Sherrill’s phone rang, and she took it out of her purse, listened, and handed it to him: "Rose Marie. Christ, she knew right where to call."
Lucas put the phone to his ear. "Yeah?"
"I didn’t interrupt a tender moment, did I?"
"Yeah. I was about to bite into a cheeseburger."
"I called Towson about your memo. He wants to meet."
"It’s too soon."
"No it’s not. I’m sending a copy over for him to read. You should get over there at two o’clock. Frank is gonna go along. From the memo, I don’t think we’re likely to get her unless she kills somebody else. So you guys are gonna have to figure something out."
Lucas dropped Sherrill back at the office, picked up Sloan, and they walked together over to O’Dell’s apartment building. The security guard recognized Sloan and sent them up.
"The basic problem is, if you go down in the elevator, you can’t get back up without a key card," Sloan said. "Even if you have a key card, there’s a monitor camera in the elevator, so a guard might recognize you… not that they spend a lot of time looking at the monitor," Sloan said, as they got in the elevator.
"So she gets off at another floor…"
"Nope. Can’t get off at another floor. If you get in at the lobby, you can go to any one floor. If you get in at any other floor, you can only go down to the lobby. Unless you have a key card."
"How about the fire stairs?"
"The doors are locked in the lobby and the skyway. From those floors, you can’t get in without a key, you can only get out. And you can’t get out on any floor except the lobby or the skyway, even if you have a key."
"A key, not a key card," Lucas said.
"That’s right-like a Schlage."
"How close do they track the cards?"
"They know how many each person is signed out for. O’Dell had three, two for herself, and one for her father, who lives way the hell out in South Dakota. We found her two cards, and her father still had his when he was here to pick up the body. So that was all of hers. But somebody else in the building? Who knows? There are almost three hundred cards out. I suppose we could try to find all of them… I’d guess a few are missing. The problem is figuring out how the McDonalds might have gotten one."
"Huh. If it was all arranged ahead of time, we’re fucked anyway. What if she had to do it off the top of her head? Maybe a day’s thought?"
Sloan shrugged. "You figure it out."
They got off on O’Dell’s floor, and Lucas stood with his back to the door of her apartment. "She went down first, then she had to get back up to kill her."
"Right."
Lucas looked at the elevator: "Even if she’s got a key card, there’s a problem coming back up to kill O’Dell. She can’t guarantee the guard won’t look at the monitor out of sheer boredom, if he sees movement on the screen. If he does, she’s dead meat. He’s just seen her
leave, and now she’s going up to kill somebody. Therefore…"
"She doesn’t use the elevator, she uses the stairwell," Sloan said. "She has a Schlage key for the door in the skyway. She signs out of the building, runs across the street to the skyway, goes up, walks across the skyway to the skyway fire door, uses her Schlage to get into the stairwell, walks up here. Where you have a problem: she can’t get out of the stairwell. There’s no key at all that’ll get you out of the stairwell onto another floor. You can only get out in the skyway or the lobby."
Lucas worked on it for a moment. "Like this," he said finally. "She knows she doesn’t have the votes to make a real deal with O’Dell: she claims she’s got them, but Bone says she didn’t, and she knows she doesn’t. She’s come here specifically to kill O’Dell-she knows that when she gets here. She can’t just sneak up and do it, because she doesn’t have any key. She doesn’t have anything. So she calls O’Dell to talk about making a deal, and her only purpose is to get into the building. So she gets out of the elevator, and right when she arrives, before she talks to O’Dell, she walks over to the fire door, opens it, takes some duct tape out of her purse, tapes the lock, walks down the stairs to the skyway, opens that door, tapes it, and then comes back up here and rings the doorbell."
"O’Dell answers it, they talk, the deal falls through, and she leaves. O’Dell sees her into the elevator, and she goes down through the lobby and signs out," Sloan said.
"Then she runs across the street, comes up into the skyway, goes in through the taped door, runs up the stairs, knocks on the door, and boom. She has to do it then-even though she knows we’ll look at her-because she can’t count on the tape being left on the door for more than a short time."
"Which explains something," Sloan said. "O’Dell told Louise Compton that there was ‘somebody at the door,’ which meant that she didn’t know who was at the door, which meant that she didn’t know who’d be arriving. She wasn’t expecting anyone, like a boyfriend. There was no easy explanation for that knock, at least not in her mind."
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