Fatal Hearts

by Norah Wilson

  “I imagine you’ve come to requisition the medical records?”

  He drew a folded manila envelope from the breast pocket of his sport jacket. “Got the papers right here.”

  “Well, you’ll need to check in with the corporate office upstairs. They’ll direct you accordingly.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” he said, tucking the envelope back in his pocket. She checked her watch. “I have to get back to work.” She levered herself to her feet. He stood and followed her to the door. As he held it open for her, she paused, looking up into those features that were so familiar, yet so strange. “It was good talking to you, Boyd. I wish it had been under better circumstances.”

  “Yeah. Same here.”

  “I just want to say again that I’m so sorry for your loss.” She pushed the words out through the sudden lump in her throat. “It’s got to be hard. Josh was a great guy. The best.”

  “Thank you. And I’m sorry you lost a friend.”

  “I still can’t believe he’s gone. I find myself checking my phone for one of his messages the moment I turn it on.”

  “God, yes, the messages. We used to talk maybe once a week, but I don’t think a day went by when I didn’t get at least one text. He used to drive me crazy with them. Now I wish I could have just one more.”

  She put a hand on his arm. When he glanced at her, she glimpsed raw grief and sorrow in his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice husky.

  “Me too.” He schooled his features back into that composed mask.

  Her heart aching, she just nodded. Tears stung the backs of her eyes as she headed back to her post.

  “Dr. Walsh?”

  She stopped, blinked a few times, then turned back to him. “Yes?”

  “Can I take you to dinner when you get off?”

  Her eyes shot open wide. “Dinner?” The idea filled her with dismay. No, not dismay. Disquiet. There was something about Boyd that unsettled her equilibrium. Maybe it was the coolness in those eyes sometimes, as though he didn’t much like her. Not that she needed or expected everyone to like her. But to have that coolness directed at her by eyes that were so like Josh’s was just . . . wrong. “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “Please?”

  She met his gaze again. He wasn’t giving her the cool-eyed treatment right now. Right now, his expression was fierce, intent.

  “You and Josh were good friends. Best friends, from the sound of it. I could use your help piecing things together. For Josh.”

  For Josh.

  The absolute last thing she wanted to do was sit down across an intimate table from Boyd McBride with this strange vibe going on. A vibe that had nothing to do with grief. But she couldn’t refuse. She’d do it for Josh.

  “Okay,” she agreed, naming a busy downtown pub and a time.

  She hoped she wasn’t going to regret it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Boyd signed in at police HQ almost two hours later. It had taken an hour to get the slim medical file from the records department, which he counted as a minor miracle. That kind of request often took days, if not longer. Twenty minutes for lunch while he took an unrewarding cruise through the hospital records, which were very minimal, and another half hour to get out of the busy hospital parking lot and downtown. Ten minutes after that, Detective Ray Morgan strode across the police station lobby toward him.

  If Boyd hadn’t met the guy already, he wouldn’t have pegged him for a cop. He’d probably have figured him for a lawyer, given the setting. For starters, that custom tailored suit looked like it belonged on a model, as did that hundred-dollar haircut. Morgan was early to midthirties by Boyd’s estimation, but it was hard to say with guys like that. The first time they’d met, Boyd had been ready to write him off as a dandified lightweight. But that was before the guy got close enough for him to get a look at his eyes and the deep grooves on either side of his mouth. That and the handshake convinced him there was a real cop under the elegant packaging after all.

  “Detective McBride,” he said, his voice as smooth and perfectly pitched as the rest of him. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Took me a while to get off the phone.”

  “Morgan.” Boyd stood and grasped the other man’s outstretched hand. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me.”

  Morgan led him back to the detectives’ bull pen. This was Boyd’s second visit, but it struck him again how small it was. A mind-blowing thought, considering that this detective squad was the sum total for the whole city. Of course, there were more citizens in the city of Toronto than in the whole province of New Brunswick. A whole hell of a lot more. So it made sense that it would be small.

  For his brother’s sake, he hoped small didn’t translate into ill equipped. Or, worse, incompetent.

  They passed several desks, some manned, some empty, but all stacked high with paper and files and sticky notes and colored phone messages. The organized chaos made him feel right at home. A detective with a phone pressed to his ear nodded at them as they passed without missing a beat of his conversation. When they reached Morgan’s desk, Boyd sat in the chair Morgan indicated.

  “Coffee?” Morgan offered.

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  Morgan gave a wry smile. “Good decision,” he conceded. After taking his suit jacket off and carefully draping it over the back of an empty chair, he took a seat. Then he reached into a drawer of his desk and withdrew a folder, which Boyd assumed to be Josh’s.

  Boyd’s gaze fell on the file on the desk between them. “So, what can you tell me about my brother’s death?”

  “Since we last talked on the phone? Very little more. I told you the coroner found no obvious problems with your brother’s heart?”

  “You did. And if I understand what you told me, that’s not common, but it’s not unheard of either. What was the stat you gave me? Up to five percent of sudden cardiac arrest victims display no discernible anatomic problems on autopsy?”

  “Correct. The forensic toxicology report is probably still weeks away.”

  Boyd raised an eyebrow. “Weeks?”

  “You know the drill, McBride. They test for probably three hundred substances. And you know there are new experimental drugs being introduced all the time and new designer crap hitting the streets. It takes time to test for all that stuff. And then if they find something, the result has to be replicated independently. If we find there was foul play, this shit has to hold up in court.”

  “I know. I’m just . . . anxious.”

  “We do have the hospital’s standard tox screen, as I’ve already reported, so the really obvious ones—alcohol, cocaine, yada yada—can probably be safely eliminated.”

  Boyd wanted to say the illegal stuff could be eliminated without the benefit of testing, because this was Josh they were talking about, dammit. The man barely even took the occasional Advil. But he knew all too well that drugs sometimes wound up in a vic’s system through no conscious choice of their own. Just ask all the roofied girls he’d talked to in ERs while a forensic nurse prepared to give them a sexual assault kit. Boyd drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

  “We’re also waiting for the genetic tests the coroner’s office ordered.” Morgan’s eyes were sympathetic. “Maybe those results will shed more light.”

  “Right.” He dragged a hand over his face. “So, what kind of wait are we talking about for the genetics? Weeks? Months?”

  “Months would be my guess. The backlog is hellish.”

  Boyd nodded his understanding. He’d had to explain similar delays to many a bereaved mother or father or wife who’d just wanted to understand what had happened to their loved one. “Maybe my results will come back first.”

  “You had genetic testing done on yourself?”

  “After what happened with Josh, I had everything done. I’ve been imaged, had ECGs, EEGs, cardiac ultrasound, stress tests. I’v
e worn a Holter monitor for forty-eight hours. They couldn’t find even a whiff of abnormality, with the electrical system or otherwise.”

  “Interesting.” Morgan scribbled a note and put it in the folder.

  Boyd gestured to the file. “Any chance I can get a copy of that?”

  “The file?” Morgan snorted. “You’re welcome to look at it, but I can’t be giving out copies. Which I think you knew before you asked. But I’ll keep you abreast of developments. Like I said on the phone, I’m happy to do another sit-down with you further down the line, if it seems like it would be useful.”

  “I guess that’ll have to be good enough.”

  The other detective’s handsome features hardened. “I’ve already assured you that when I get toxicology back, you’ll know about it. When I have the genetics report, you’ll hear from me. Short of deputizing you and handing you the case, I don’t know what more I can do.”

  “Sorry.” Boyd held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. The man was right. And the last thing Boyd wanted to do was piss off his best window into Josh’s case. “I know you’re bending over backwards here. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I’m just—”

  “I know.” Some of the ice went out of Morgan’s eyes. “Don’t sweat it.”

  Boyd cleared his throat. “Look, I know you told me a lot of this stuff on the phone, and I appreciate that. I really do. But can you walk me through the timeline again? I just need to understand what happened.”

  Something stirred in Morgan’s eyes now. Pity, he realized. Ordinarily, that would sting. Nobody pitied Boyd McBride. But under the circumstances, he’d take it. Take it and exploit it if he could.

  Anything to find out the truth about Josh’s death.

  “Sure.” Morgan pulled the file closer, opened it, rifled through a few papers. “Josh got up early that day. He responded to emails around six a.m. As you know, he was living at Stratton House B&B—Dr. Sylvia Stratton’s place on Waterloo Row—rather than renting an apartment. The housekeeper there reported that he had breakfast at about six fifty, same as usual. He had his laptop with him at the breakfast table. Said he was putting the finishing touches on an article he was going to file that day with his editor at the paper.” Morgan glanced up. “I probably told you all this last time you were here. We’d pretty much had this timeline worked up.”

  “Yeah, but keep going. Maybe I’ll hear something I missed last time. I wasn’t at my best.”

  “Okay.” Morgan scanned the page in front of him again. “Sylvia Stratton and two of her staffers, including the aforementioned housekeeper, saw Josh at breakfast and attested that he looked fine. The housekeeper remarked she thought he seemed especially upbeat, although she concedes he was always in good spirits. Dr. Stratton didn’t notice anything different.”

  “Judging by the voice mail he left for me, I’d say he probably was upbeat. Excited.”

  Morgan nodded. “Right. The message he left you saying he thought he’d made a major breakthrough in discovering the identity of your birth parents. That search, of course, being the whole reason he moved to Fredericton in the first place. But damned if we could find any evidence of what he’d learned.”

  “What about the laptop?” Boyd had explored the computer himself, had opened and read every last file. But his skill level in IT matters topped out at using a password recovery tool to get into Josh’s various accounts and software programs. When he’d found nothing on Josh’s search for their birth parents, he’d turned the laptop over to the police for a deeper look. “Your tech crimes guys weren’t able to find anything? No hidden files or deleted files that might still be recoverable?”

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly what I’m saying. I just got the report yesterday.” Morgan flipped through a few pieces of paper until he found the one he wanted. “Our guy resuscitated everything he could, and still nothing about the investigation. Just the casual mentions in emails to you. That includes a search of your brother’s Internet-based web mail addresses and”—he paused to scan the report—“the automated online backup service he subscribed to, his Dropbox, and a dozen other places he might have stashed a file.” Morgan looked up again. “Apart from the exchanges between you and him, we found a big fat nothing.”

  “What about the physical notebooks?” Boyd had found dozens of them in Josh’s room at Dr. Stratton’s. From his own perusal on his last visit, he was certain they were all work related. However, on the remote chance that Josh had used them as some bizarre way of hiding or disguising the notes from his personal investigation, he’d asked Morgan to see if one of Josh’s coworkers could corroborate that.

  Boyd was a damned good cop, but, in his state of grief and shock, he hadn’t trusted himself to have a critical eye on Josh’s things. Turning the laptop and notebooks over had seemed like the best next step after his initial search yielded nothing.

  “No joy there either,” Morgan said. “Everything in them corresponded to articles which were subsequently published or scheduled to be published. No cryptic messages or hidden codes.”

  “Dammit. I was hoping there’d be something there.”

  Morgan grimaced. “My money was on the laptop. But unless your brother was the kind of guy who was obsessive about secure deletion, it’s pretty safe to say the file never existed on that computer. At least not on the hard drive or the flash drives you gave us.”

  “Secure deletion?”

  “Yeah. A tool that overwrites all the clusters where the data was originally stored with a bunch of random data.”

  Boyd frowned. “Josh was careful with data. He was an investigative journalist; he had to be concerned about the security of his files. But I’m talking more about relying on firewalls, complex, frequently changed passwords, and using only secure Wi-Fi. I doubt that concern extended far enough to prompt him to use deletion tools designed to thwart a forensic computer specialist.”

  “Did he have any other electronic storage devices?”

  “His iPhone. But as you know, that was never found. Unless . . . ?”

  “No, nothing’s turned up.”

  Boyd nodded grimly. Without a warrant from a judge, the phone companies weren’t prepared to try to triangulate it for them. They only did that kind of thing without a warrant if a life was in immediate danger. Since Josh was dead, the urgency—or exigency, as the lawyers liked to call it—required to obtain that cooperation was absent. Personally, Boyd figured it would be a waste of time anyway. He was convinced someone had taken Josh’s cell phone. And the first thing they would have done was yank out the battery, destroy the SIM card, and pulverize the phone.

  When Boyd had alerted Morgan that Josh’s phone was missing—another factor that had tipped them from sudden death investigation to suspicious death—the cops had used the police K-9 to do an article search of all the walking trails, in case Josh had simply dropped it on his jog. The search had netted lots of interesting items, none of them belonging to Josh.

  “No iPad or Android tablet? Anything like that?”

  Boyd shook his head. “I highly doubt it. I gave him a PDA once, thinking he might prefer to use it for notes instead of those notebooks, but he never really took to it. He just preferred pen and paper. Said they never crashed or got hacked.”

  “You still think he kept a physical notebook on the birth investigation?”

  “More than ever. This investigation was so personal to him, I can see him not trusting his research notes to digital. The forensic sweep of the laptop pretty much confirms my hunch. Which leaves a couple of possibilities. Either his notes were stolen along with his phone when he died or he might have hidden the notebook somewhere.”

  Morgan tilted his head. “You really think he might have hidden it?”

  “If he didn’t have it on him, yes. I’m pretty sure he’d secure it somehow. He’d never just leave it lying around.”

  “Hidden it wh
ere?”

  “His room at Stratton House is the most obvious place.”

  Morgan nodded. “His personal belongings were all removed, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah, I packed up the room myself on my first visit to collect my brother’s body. I didn’t get around to doing a deep search of it at that time.” Between cracking passwords and reading everything on Josh’s computer, scanning those notebooks, meeting with police, dealing with the Fredericton funeral director on the logistics of preparation for transport, and checking in frequently with his parents, he hadn’t had time for that kind of search, even if it had occurred to him to do so. Which it hadn’t. “I plan to go by there soon, see if they’ll let me have some time in the room, if it hasn’t been rented to someone else.”

  “Good plan.” Morgan nodded approvingly. “I can’t see them denying your request, if the room is still empty.” He looked down at the file. “Shall we get back to Josh’s day?”

  “Please.”

  “He was at his desk at the paper by seven fifteen and filed his story. He worked until eleven.” Morgan’s finger trailed over the printed report as he scanned it. “Then he went for a lunch-hour jog at Odell Park, which he did on days when he didn’t get in a morning jog. When he got back into his car, he suffered a fatal cardiac arrest. Another park visitor discovered him toward late afternoon. The sun had moved and your brother’s car was no longer in the shade. The guy thought it was odd someone would choose to doze in a hot car in the direct sun and went to check on him. He called nine-one-one, and there was an officer on the scene in four minutes. That’s what we know.”

  “Right.” Boyd’s hands fisted despite himself. “Because there’s no security camera in the parking lot.”

  Morgan pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s a park, McBride. People go there to sit on benches and eat their lunch or feed the ducks or walk or run. I can’t remember the last crime committed there. Besides, you know how expensive it is for a city to install cameras in all of their public locations. I doubt this would be seen as a high priority for City Council.”