by Lisa Black
The dead boy.
“That’s him,” the woman said, twisting her hands together. “I really don’t know what happened.”
Now Maggie noted her ID badge hanging from a lanyard around her neck: CATHY BRANDRETH, R.N.
Maggie began to snap pictures, capturing the room from each wall, the other three adults shuffling to keep out of her lens, not always with success. Riley asked Nurse Brandreth to bring them up to speed.
“Tawanna sent him down here on Saturday. He had a small fever, a hair over a hundred, and acted as if his throat hurt. General malaise—some of these kids, lying around like a slug is their normal operating mode. But Tawanna said Damon usually bounced off the walls, so if he didn’t seem to feel like doing anything, he really didn’t.”
Maggie moved in closer to the boy. He wore a gray T-shirt and rested on his back, face turned toward the ceiling. A sheet covered his lower half while a thermal blanket had slid to the floor. A small wooden puzzle with colored shapes sat on the table, a glass of water next to it.
The boy’s eyes were open in a startled look of pain or surprise, hands clenching the sheet to his chest. White foam flecked his lips and filled his mouth.
Poison. Or some kind of overdose. Or some odd physical ailment Maggie did not recognize.
“I had him lie down for a while, gave him two Children’s Tylenol and a peppermint candy. You’d be amazed what a peppermint candy can cure. But when I checked an hour later the fever hadn’t gone down so I gave him a rapid strep test, which was positive, so I had the doctor on call stop by. They’re usually in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He came Saturday evening, brought him liquid amoxicillin, fever came down that night, general malaise persisted. The other nurse—Sheba—noted the same. Damon seemed back to normal this morning but I was keeping him here for another day, making sure the antibiotic had knocked it out. With all these kids in close quarters, we can’t let something get around.” Her voice had grown steady during this recital. She knew her job and felt comfortable in her expertise.
“Roger that,” Riley said. “Anyone else in his … group … sick?”
“Nope.”
“No reaction to the amoxicillin?” Jack asked.
“No, he was fine with it. Four teaspoons a day. Grape flavored, so he swallowed it no problem. I gave him the morning dose, he had breakfast, no fever, but I wanted to keep him out of class one more day. I didn’t want to expose the day students to him or vice versa, in case anything lingered or his immune system was still weak. I gave him the morning dose, came back and he was”—her voice caught—“as you see him.”
“Came back from where?”
She kept staring at the dead boy as she spoke. “The twelve to thirteen outdoor rec. The play area—it’s a little fenced lawn on the north side. They have outdoor games, kickball, not really kickball but a combination of games and calisthenics… games, not sports. Sports are too competitive and they’re trying to foster cooperation, which for some of these kids is an entirely new concept.” She put a hand to her face. “Sorry. I’m babbling.”
Riley, of course, soothed. Jack simply waited. Maggie wondered if he knew how intimidating his waiting face could be.
But Nurse Brandreth wasn’t looking at him anyway. “It was about ten-thirty. Marley—from the twelve to thirteen group—came to get me. They’d been kicking a ball around and a girl fell and jammed her finger. No real damage, basically a little rubbing and patting and assuring her that it would be fine. I put a Band-Aid on it to make her feel better and came back. I couldn’t have been gone more than twenty minutes.”
“Was this after you’d given him the amoxicillin?” Maggie asked.
“Yes … immediately, I guess. I remember I was capping the bottle when Marley burst in, all red faced.” She turned from Damon’s body with an abrupt twist and strode the four steps to her small “station,” a desk with wall-mounted cabinets behind it. She opened one and reached—
“Don’t touch that!” Maggie cried.
The nurse jerked her hand back as if the bottle of liquid antibiotic might grow teeth and bite her. Maggie moved closer. The brown glass surface bore a printed label with the boy’s name—Damon Kish—and the contents and dosage information.
“Is that cabinet kept locked?” Riley asked, as Maggie photographed the bottle.
A long pause. “It locks. I keep all of them locked most of the time.”
“Today? Before you gave Damon the morning dose?”
Another pause, during which she undoubtedly saw her career passing before her eyes. “I don’t always lock them when I’m here, and it’s mostly too high for the kids to reach … the littler kids … unless they stood on the chair, I guess, and I’m usually in here every minute when I have a patient.” She gestured to another door and added, “This one … that’s always kept locked. It’s got the Ritalin and the antidepressants, anything that has street value. So many of these kids come in with their own scripts.” She tugged on its handle before Maggie could warn about fingerprints. Still secure.
Riley asked again, “And today? The cabinet with the antibiotic?”
Her shoulders sagged. “No, not today. I had to unlock it for his morning dose, but I didn’t … what do you think, someone tampered with it? With what? What could they have put in it that would kill a kid like that, practically instantly?”
“I don’t know. Do you have any toxic substances in these cabinets?”
She thought. “No. It’s all basic first aid stuff.”
“Was the twenty minutes the only time you left the room since the morning dose?”
Her tone dipped several degrees farther into misery. “No. I popped in and out to get some coffee from Reception, to get a report from the fax machine on one of the kids that juvenile detention sent over. I went to the ladies’ room once, maybe twice. I got Damon’s breakfast from the kitchen, took the tray back…. I can’t even guess how many times I left.” She added, “I got a Fitbit for my birthday. I’m trying to up my daily steps.”
“I understand,” Riley said, but his verbal empathy did not seem to comfort her. “We’re going to have to take the bottle, of course, and Maggie will fingerprint that cabinet.”
I guess I’m fingerprinting a cabinet, Maggie thought. And the water glass, the nightstand, and the doorknobs … She thought of something else. “Is this room locked when you step out?”
“No. If he had some sort of medical episode and started yelling while I was on the other side of the building, the other staff would need to get in here.” She slumped into her desk chair. “It’s never been a problem before. Ninety-nine percent of the kids are under supervision at all times.”
The thrust of the building’s design, Maggie thought, was to keep the adults safe from the kids, and to keep the kids safe from other kids. Keeping the kids safe from the adults ran a very distant third.
The kids, after all, had the proven history of violence. Though obviously the twelve-to thirteen-year-old Marley had been running around on her own, so exceptions were made.
The two detectives continued questioning the nurse while Maggie opened all the doors except the one locked cabinet. She took photographs of each one, as soon they would be covered in black powder and look quite different. The cabinet doors themselves were smooth and white—an ideal surface for the black powder—and she pulled one piece of tape after another off with patterns of fingers and palms. She spread each piece on a glossy white fingerprint card. Trying to identify them all would be a nightmare given the number of staff and residents and, since they were right next door to reception, any visitors, family members, legal counsel, and relatives dropping off or picking up.
She spread another piece of tape over another set of blackened ridges.
Riley’s phone rang and he answered it, then asked the nurse if she would guide in the medical examiner’s investigator. As soon as she left the room, Jack moved to Maggie’s side.
“Poison?”
“I think so. I can’t see another reason fo
r an otherwise healthy kid to drop dead, but we haven’t examined the body yet.”
He waved at the basket labeled DIABETIC SUPPLIES. “What about insulin? Could that have killed him within twenty minutes?”
“You’re assuming it was added to the amoxicillin bottle?”
“Yes. You’re going to fingerprint it?” It still sat on its shelf.
“Of course I am! But I want to superglue it. I’m not quite willing to go with simple black powder for that item. And swallowing insulin wouldn’t have any effect; the stomach acids will just break up the proteins. That’s why it has to be given by injection.”
He continued to scan the shelves. Riley joined them. “What about the Ritalin? If someone had a key.”
“It’s a stimulant…. I believe it’s possible to overdose on it but I don’t think you could fit enough in a”—she checked the dosage on the amoxicillin bottle—“teaspoon to kill someone so quickly, even a skinny little kid like him.”
Riley, having pulled on latex gloves, gingerly poked through a basket labeled MISC. “What about Lanoxin? Anything?”
“Digitalis,” Maggie said. “Odd thing to have around for kids.”
He read the label. “It’s two years old. Probably left over from a staff member. Would it kill?”
“It could, but again I have no idea how much would be needed, or if it would fit in a teaspoon. You’d have to crush up the pills and hope they dissolve in the antibiotic. They might just fall to the bottom.”
“Antifreeze?” he suggested. “I know that’s poisonous.”
“Do you see antifreeze?” Jack asked.
“It’s got to be somewhere in the building. Or in the trunk of somebody’s car.”
“Causes vomiting,” Maggie said, “and wouldn’t work that fast.”
“We only have her word for that twenty-minute time frame,” Riley pointed out. “Maybe he wasn’t perfectly fine when she left the room.”
Jack said, “And it sounds like the other nurse had all night to work, probably without interruption.”
“This is all guesswork until we get the toxicology results,” Maggie warned them.
“Or we turn him over and find a knife in his back.”
She added, “Exactly, and there were also several opportunities for Damon to get up, come over here, stand on a chair, and help himself. He wasn’t that sick anymore, certainly capable of getting up and around.”
“Boy, I’ll say. He was certainly up and around when we got here. Came out swinging just like before.”
“Wait,” Maggie said. “You were here? When he died?”
Riley explained how they had come to retrieve Rachael’s possessions, and Damon had seemed more than all right. “Quite energetic, in fact. Nearly knocked my partner down.” Suddenly he asked Jack, “Did you see anyone?”
“What?”
“I just realized, that nurse went past us on the stairs, then you had to visit the little boys’ room. Did you see anyone?”
“No. No one in reception either, just the woman at the desk.” He spoke stiffly, oddly. Maggie noticed but couldn’t interpret what that meant. But then she couldn’t interpret much of anything when it came to Jack. He had his own unique configuration.
“See the kid?” Riley asked his partner.
“Nope. Door was closed. And shopping at the drugstore while the nurse was out sounds exactly like what that kid would do. I’m surprised he lasted two days in here without either biting her or setting the bandages on fire.”
Maggie said, “Here’s the thing. I don’t know what in these cabinets could be a potential poison or not, or if there is such an item it could have been given to him by someone else or he took it himself. We really won’t know until the autopsy is done, toxicology results are in, and/or I can give them the amoxicillin bottle for analysis. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime this is a crime scene,” Jack finished for her.
Riley said, “We need to lock it down, seal all these cabinets.”
Maggie said, “Which means the nurse doesn’t have access to her supplies, or the kids to their own medications.”
“What a mess,” Riley groaned. “The nurse will have all sorts of reasons why we can’t do that, most of which will be true and accurate. But at the same time she is officially number-one suspect, so what do we do?”
“Tell Patty to start preparing a court order for us,” Jack said.
“We have to ask our de facto boss to start our paperwork. We’ll have to put lovely red tamperproof tape over all these doors. A bunch of juvenile delinquents are going to be without their meds, and we’ll have to pull a patrol officer off the streets to sit here and guard the scene. Patty’s not going to be happy about this one and neither is Nurse Brandreth. Ain’t nobody going to be happy about this one.”
Jack said, “But if we don’t, then we’re sloppy, careless investigators who let a killer walk free because we didn’t care about some little psycho kid.”
“I can process everything here,” Maggie said. “It’s just going to take a while. We’ll have to fingerprint all the bottles, then verify the scripts, then count all the pills and determine if there are any missing. If I can get Josh or Amy over here with the portable chamber and maybe some iodine fuming wands, I might be done in here by … dinnertime.”
“That’s not too bad,” Riley said.
“Dinnertime tomorrow,” Maggie clarified.
The official number-one suspect reappeared with the ME investigator, this time a tall blond man with a slight limp. He took the same type of overall photos that Maggie had and then concentrated on the small, still form.
Removing the sheet revealed no surprises. The boy wore pajama pants along with the gray T-shirt and had kicked off white socks. The investigator took careful note of the boy’s eyes, with no petechiae, which might indicate strangulation, and his mouth, with no damage that might indicate smothering. The foam suggested poison or overdose but could result from other events as well.
The pathologist would need the amoxicillin bottle, and Maggie promised to hand-deliver it after she processed it for latent prints. Try as he might, the investigator could not talk her out of handing it over now.
“You really think someone poisoned this kid?” he asked her.
“I don’t know. But I’m not going to take the chance.”
He suggested finding a fresh plastic urine sample cup and pouring out the liquid antibiotic, then she could keep her bottle and he could have the amoxicillin, but it wouldn’t have been possible to get the lid off without touching the bottle and she didn’t want to take even that small chance of disturbing the only trace of a child killer. If, of course, there was a fingerprint on the bottle and if the bottle contained poison and if the poison had killed Damon Kish.
They finished the examination of the body. Damon did not have a knife in his back or any other sign of injury. His dorsal surfaces had begun to turn a cherry pink as the blood obeyed the law of gravity and pooled to coagulate. The upper thigh on his right side had a healing road rash from hip to knee. The nurse said it had been from falling in the outdoor play area the day before he’d come down with the sore throat. She’d cleaned the scrapes and spread some Neosporin over the area, not for the first time. Damon tended to run into things full tilt. “I guess no one ever taught him to be careful. No one ever taught him anything.”
She stepped out to escort the body removal team, who gently ushered Damon into the same type of body bag that had so fascinated the boy only a few days before. Maggie wondered if in some other dimension that would come as a comfort to him, the boy with a curiosity about death being able to experience it for himself. She hoped so. She hoped that he would find the next world more comforting than the last.
The detectives wanted to talk to the boy’s dorm “mother” as well as get his complete social and medical history from Dr. Palmer. They slipped past the nurse as she scanned the hallway to make sure the coast was clear of children or parents before the body could be spirite
d out of the building. She made them wait as the girl who had been in the waiting room when Maggie arrived now followed a woman past the door. All the makeup had been scrubbed off and damp strands of hair clung to her neck. The dirty clothes had been replaced with a soft T-shirt and thin sweatpants, tennis shoes, and a stack of other clothes carried against her chest. She still wore the fake diamond on its chain, but that seemed to be the only thing left of the earlier persona. The bravado and contempt had been washed away with the eyeliner, and now she seemed soft, more than a little apprehensive, and about five years younger.
As Damon left the building, Dr. Palmer arrived. He had been at a county government meeting and had returned as quickly as possible; his graying hair had been tossed by the wind and a haphazard pile of binders threatened to slip from his arms.
“Please come into my office,” he said upon seeing them, and bustled away without waiting for an answer. The cops glanced at Maggie, then abandoned her. She turned to Nurse Brandreth.
“This is what we’re going to have to do,” she began.
Chapter 9
Dr. Palmer’s office spanned perhaps ten feet from one wall to its opposite, with even less between the other two. It perched on a corner of the third floor with a view of the rooftop basketball court, currently empty. He waded between an overstuffed bookshelf and the cartons stacked on the side of his desk to reach his chair, an ancient leather thing with stuffing bursting out of one seam. The room smelled like it looked, of old books and damp shoes and years of brown-bagged ham on rye. The shelves held tome after tome, magazines, loose Xeroxed articles, and the occasional family photograph. Nothing that told Jack much about the man, other than he didn’t care much about appearances or self-aggrandizement. There were no framed diplomas, photos with city leaders, or awards.
“Sorry the place is a mess,” he said, apparently automatically and without much real regret. He let Jack and Riley move file folders off the two folding chairs between the door and the desk.
