Fatal Hearts

by Norah Wilson

“And?”

  “There was definitely an aggravating agent present.”

  Boyd couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t make a sound. Fortunately, Morgan didn’t seem to expect anything of him and plowed on.

  “Specifically, an antidepressant.”

  Antidepressant? The word exploded in Boyd’s brain. “No way! There’s no fucking way my brother was taking antidepressants. Not voluntarily anyway.”

  “Do me a favor and sit down, would you?”

  “I’m standing on the fucking sidewalk, Morgan.”

  “Okay, then just chill for a second. You’re going to scare the nice people if you don’t dial back the volume.”

  He turned in a circle, phone still pressed to his ear. And, crap, people were crossing the sidewalk to avoid him.

  “Okay.” He stepped into an empty alley. “I’m sorry about that. I’m cool now.” He pressed the bridge of his nose and leaned against the brick building. “Go on.”

  “The report was waiting for us this morning. Testing must have been pretty much done, and then they fired it over here when Quig asked them to expedite.”

  “And?”

  “And when we saw he had antidepressants in his system, we started calling pharmacies. We found one where he’d filled a prescription, just over six weeks prior to his death. A three-month supply.”

  Boyd gripped the receiver. This wasn’t happening. “Who?” he said, his voice shaking with rage. “Who was the doctor who prescribed the meds?”

  “Dr. Gunn,” Morgan said.

  Boyd pushed away from the brick wall. “That son of a bitch. He killed Josh.”

  “Hang on, McBride. I don’t know that it’s all that cut-and-dried. Turns out Josh was a patient of Gunn’s.”

  “What?”

  “Gunn has a patient file for Josh dating back to a few months after Josh came here.”

  “No way was he taking antidepressants,” Boyd insisted.

  “You don’t get these therapeutic levels in your blood because someone slipped you a single dose, or even a handful of doses. Ask Hayden. You get these levels by carefully and consciously taking a prescribed dose every day of your life.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense. He wasn’t depressed. He was happy with his life here. Hayden can tell you that.”

  “You can’t be sure of that, Morgan. If you were being treated for depression, how many people would you tell?”

  “I’m telling you, he wasn’t depressed. I talked to the guy often enough. I would know.”

  “Would he know if you were depressed based on a weekly or twice-weekly phone conversation?”

  “That’s different. I can be irritable and taciturn by nature. Josh never was.”

  Morgan sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this medical file we found at Gunn’s is completely fabricated. Maybe the results of the blood work he ordered up to check on thyroid function is faked too.”

  Boyd was a silent a few seconds. Could Josh have been depressed? It didn’t seem possible. “There’s really a file?”

  “Yeah. It’s mostly about the depression, but there’s mention of an upper respiratory infection. Do you remember Josh ever mentioning something like that?”

  Dammit, he had. Shortly after he’d moved to Fredericton. He’d blamed it on all the clean air. And he’d temporarily cut back the running so as not to suck the infection deeper into his lungs before it had a chance to clear.

  Could Josh really have been seeing Dr. Gunn? And could he have been depressed? How could something like that slip under Boyd’s radar?

  Okay, pretty easily, since Boyd never asked anyone about their feelings. But no way that little detail would have gotten past Hayden.

  “You there, McBride?”

  “Sorry, yeah. Just trying to work this through. And I still don’t buy it, Morgan. I just don’t believe it.”

  “Well, the coroner’s office is liking it. They’re anticipating the genetic report will show LQTS. If it does, it’ll take them about ten seconds to declare death by natural causes due to cardiac arrest arising from undiagnosed long QT syndrome, brought to light by the presence of an aggravating agent, to wit, this antidepressant with the long-assed name. But obviously, no one’s about to go out on that limb without the results of the genetic tests.”

  “What about you?” Boyd asked. “What do you believe?”

  “I believe this medical record bears a little more scrutiny. For one thing, all the consultations seem to have been at night, at Dr. Gunn’s home.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Yeah, I know. Odd. I suppose it could be they’d formed a friendship. Everyone knows what a friendly guy Josh was. Or it could be Josh cultivated Gunn as a source of information about what was going on inside the health system. Gunn was active on some provincial committees and task forces. So, on the one hand, you can kinda see how that sort of relationship might have evolved. On the other, it seems convenient that the home visits make it impossible to cross-check the appointments against the receptionist’s appointment log.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty damned convenient, all right.” Boyd swore. “Okay, tell me this—why commit suicide then? If Gunn really had this relationship with Josh, and he legitimately prescribed the antidepressants, and Josh voluntarily took them and then died of an unfortunate accident, where’s the big guilt problem?”

  “I don’t know,” Morgan conceded.

  Boyd’s mind was racing toward another possibility. A bone-chilling one.

  “Or shit, maybe Gunn somehow knew long before Josh did that Arianna Duncan was his mother. If that’s the case, he might have suspected Josh inherited the LQTS that likely killed our mother, in combination with those antidepressants. Maybe he set Josh up. Befriended him, convinced him he needed medication, then sat back and waited for the same thing to happen to him as happened to his patient, our mother. Maybe he killed Josh.”

  “Jesus, there’s a horrifying thought.”

  “Yeah. That would make it premeditated murder.”

  “I get the premeditated business,” Morgan said, “but, technically, I’m not sure it’s murder. Even if you could prove malicious intent, that he prescribed drugs hoping they’d kill Josh, it probably wasn’t a sure thing that your brother would die as a result. Manslaughter, more likely. And hell, if Gunn didn’t have absolute proof that Josh had LQTS, maybe it wouldn’t even warrant that. Maybe it’s criminal negligence. Or administering a noxious substance. And for any charge to stick, you’d have to be able to prove mens rea, that he prescribed the stuff with a guilty mind. It would be up to the prosecutors to figure out.”

  Boyd was in no mood to debate the finer points of a possible charge against a man who was already dead.

  “You said there were hospital reports in the file? Lab work?”

  “Yeah, to monitor levels of this antidepressant in his blood.”

  “Can you confirm that they’re real? Josh would have had to go to the hospital or a clinic to have his blood drawn, right?”

  “Presumably. And we’ll look into that. I’ll also have a personal conversation with the pharmacist who filled the script, see if he or she remembers Josh.”

  “Good idea,” Boyd said. “Make sure it was actually Josh who filled the prescription. And couldn’t you also cross-check the appointment dates with Gunn’s Medicare billings? Josh was fully covered by provincial insurance, so you’d think Gunn would have billed for the consultations.”

  “I thought of that,” Morgan said, “but when I thought about it, I could see why he might not have billed. For the office-based practice, I’m pretty sure he’d have clerical staff to do the billing for him, but if the consultations and the records were at Gunn’s home, they wouldn’t naturally feed into the billing stream unless Gunn took the trouble to do it himself. For a few bucks here and there, he probably wouldn’t have bothered.”

 
Damn. “Makes sense, I guess. But it wouldn’t hurt to know one way or another.”

  “Already on my to-do list,” Morgan said. “I just wanted to point out that by itself, that information might not carry much weight.”

  “Thanks,” Boyd said.

  “So now that you’re up to speed, can I count on you to be cool? Sit on the sidelines for once and let us do our jobs?”

  Boyd dragged a frustrated hand down his face. What choice did he have? “Sure. I’ll stay out of your way. Just . . . get to the truth, okay? I need the truth.”

  “We’ll do our best. Hang in there, McBride.”

  Boyd pocketed his phone, then hauled it right out again. He had to call Hayden.

  CHAPTER 28

  Hayden had just finished dealing with a guy with a blocked salivary duct, and she was still smiling at his reaction to her solution.

  He was probably pretty good-looking under normal circumstances but not tonight. The poor guy had been terrified when his face suddenly ballooned while he was eating Chinese food. Of course, he’d freaked out, thinking it was an allergy, and his girlfriend had rushed him to the ER. The expression on his face when she’d handed him a WARHEADS sour candy had been priceless. She’d explained he should keep sucking sour candies to stimulate saliva production until the stone yielded to pressure and got flushed out. She gave him instructions to return if that didn’t resolve the problem, since surgery was occasionally required.

  She was just about to move on to the next patient when Marta, the ER secretary, grabbed her. “I’ve got a caller for you—Boyd McBride. Says it’s important.”

  Her smile disappeared. Could the tox report be back already?

  She followed Marta back to the desk and picked up the phone. “Boyd? What’s up?”

  “Sorry to bother you at work, but I need your take on this. And you didn’t answer your cell.”

  “You heard from the police?”

  “Yeah. The tox report is back. They’re saying Josh had an antidepressant in his system.” He named the drug. Not the most commonly used one, but not rarely used either.

  “How much? I mean, was it a ginormous overdose or a little bit or a normal therapeutic dose?”

  “That last one,” he said. “The kind of levels you have in your blood when you’ve taken it every day for weeks or months.”

  “No.” She rejected the idea instantly. “Josh was not depressed. He was not under a doctor’s care for clinical depression.”

  “That’s what I told Morgan, but he pointed out men aren’t all that forthcoming about their mental health.”

  “But I’d have seen something. Sure, I know men can present different than women. They don’t tend to seem sad. But they do tend to get irritable. Biggest clue—they lose interest in pursuits they used to find pleasurable. I didn’t see that in him at all. Or fatigue or sleep disruption. He seemed . . . normal.”

  “Is there any other medical reason someone might take antidepressants?”

  “In some circumstances, but none that apply to Josh.”

  “What kind of circumstances?”

  “They can be very effective for chronic pain. Certain antidepressants are also used for smoking cessation and as a sleep aid. But I know Josh didn’t have chronic pain and wasn’t a smoker. As far as I know, he didn’t suffer from insomnia either. Besides, antidepressants tend to have side effects that men aren’t keen on.”

  “Like what?”

  “Loss of sexual desire.”

  “You don’t think . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “What if he knew the meds would curb sexual desire? Given, you know, what I told you, do you think—”

  “Oh, God, I hope not.” That would be too cruel. If he’d taken antidepressants to dull his desire for her, and that led to his death . . .

  “No,” Boyd said. “No. We were right the first time. He wasn’t depressed.”

  She wanted to believe that. Desperately. “Wait, he didn’t even have a doctor here, thanks to the shortage of family physicians. There’s a waiting list a mile long. How would he even get a prescription? It’s not the kind of thing they’re going to hand out at an after-hours clinic.”

  “Morgan says he had a prescription that was filled at a downtown pharmacy about six weeks before his death.”

  She gripped the telephone receiver tighter. “And who wrote the prescription?”

  “Dr. Gunn,” Boyd said.

  “Wait, what? That doesn’t make sense. You said he’d been taking it for weeks, but he’d only just met Gunn.”

  “The cops say Gunn has a medical file for Josh. That he’d been seeing Gunn since shortly after he got here, probably when he had that upper respiratory bug.”

  “Um, he saw a doctor for that URTI—me. I advised him on over-the-counter medications for his cough, told him to rest more, cut out the running, and take lots of vitamins C and D. I even made him chicken soup.”

  “Then how do you explain the file?”

  “It’s got to be faked, Boyd. I know Josh didn’t know Dr. Gunn. Remember that night he got the phone call and wrote down Gunn’s name on my checkbook? He asked me what I knew about him, what kind of practice he had, and I filled him in. At the time, I figured he was interested because of his work at the paper where he covered health issues, so I told him about some of the committee work Gunn had done for the Medical Society and the Regional Health Authority.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line as Boyd digested that.

  “I’m telling you, Boyd, Josh didn’t know Gunn, and he sure as hell wasn’t clinically depressed.” She closed her eyes and pressed a hand to her now throbbing temple. “But now that you say he had that drug in his system, some things make sense.”

  “Yeah, like him dropping dead.”

  Hayden winced. “Yeah, that too. But remember what I said about how he seemed to mellow as the summer wore on? More content to sit and sunbathe at the lake and not so insistent about needing to be go-go-going all the time.” She bit her lip.

  “Well, if he didn’t know Gunn and he wasn’t voluntarily taking the drug—a point on which we both agree—then who was giving it to him?”

  “What about the people at work?” she suggested.

  “Dammit. Dave Bradley.”

  “What? Dave Bradley? No. Why would Dave Bradley give a noxious substance to Josh?”

  “He liked you,” Boyd pointed out. “He liked you so much, he was following you and taking pictures of you.”

  Her heart thumped. “What?”

  “Josh noticed what he was doing and gathered evidence, which he then used to make sure Bradley cut it out.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “Not even close. I discovered it when I pressed Bradley early on about his shifty behavior. I thought he might know something about Josh’s death, but after he broke and told me about the other thing, I realized he was just freaking out, thinking I’d found digital copies of the incriminating pictures.”

  “I can’t believe this!”

  “Believe it. By the way, the first thing Bradley did when he heard Josh was dead was ransack Josh’s cubicle to recover the stalking photos before the cops found them.”

  “Omigod. I thought he backed off because I finally got through to him.”

  “Josh got through to him in the only way a man like that understands.”

  “Okay, so Dave Bradley is creepier than I thought he was. But what makes you suggest he might have been involved in giving Josh antidepressants? That doesn’t make sense. To set Josh up like that, he’d need not only the general medical knowledge but the specific medical knowledge about how your mother died. Plus he’d have to know Arianna Duncan was Josh’s mother.”

  “I don’t have any answers,” Boyd said.

  “Also, Dave Bradley couldn’t have done it. He’d only be a
ble to slip Josh the antidepressant on weekdays. If you’re on a therapeutic dose of antidepressant, you can’t miss two days. I’m not sure about this antidepressant, but with some of them, after missing a couple of days, you’d have to back off to the introductory dose or at least a lower dose and work back up.”

  “Like I said, I don’t have all the answers. But I do know Bradley is related to Sylvia Stratton somehow. And he’s been coming around Stratton House, evidently to pry background information out of Sylvia about Dr. Gunn after he died.”

  “We’re back to Angus Gunn, who knew how Arianna Duncan died and who also knew that Josh was Arianna’s son. I just don’t know how he could have delivered the antidepressants to Josh over that stretch of time.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  “What?”

  “It’s Sylvia. Sylvia Stratton was the only one in a position to administer the drug every day. Maybe she did it for Gunn. They were old friends.”

  Hayden caught her breath with a gasp. “Boyd, do you know what you’re saying? This is Sylvia Stratton we’re talking about. And you’re saying . . . You’re suggesting—”

  “That she helped Gunn commit murder? Yes, I do believe it. Although Ray Morgan thinks murder would be a hard charge to make stick, no matter who did it. But think about it, Hayden. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Sense?” Her laugh came out like a sob. “None of this makes sense. Why would she do that to Josh?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Gunn had something on her, something that—”

  He broke off so suddenly, she thought his cell phone had dropped the call. “Boyd? Boyd, are you still there?”

  “Shit, Hayden, maybe Gunn did know something and Sylvia decided he had to go. And by making it look like suicide, she makes him look guilty of orchestrating Josh’s death.”

  “I can’t keep up.” She pressed her temple. “The longer we speculate, the uglier it gets.”

  “Look, I’ve gotta go. I walked downtown for supper and now I’ve got to haul ass back to Stratton House.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t go back there alone. Call Detective Morgan. Tell him everything you just told me.”