Beau had loaded his plate with mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and three pieces of chicken. “Yeah, and he’s still adamant that he had nothing to do with what happened to Percy.”
“You believe him?”
“Not sure. My impression is that he can be hot-headed, but he doesn’t seem devious. Although … he had a hard time looking me in the eye during questioning, at several points. Maybe he was just struggling with appearing foolish over being scammed.” He was picking up his second piece of chicken when his phone rang.
“Yeah, Travis,” he said, after checking the screen. “What’s up?”
He listened for a minute. “That’s pretty late. Rico’s on tonight. Have him handle it. Tell him he can call me if he’s got reason to hold her or if things take a weird turn during the questioning. In fact, put him on the phone.”
“Is it Missy—or, I should say, Ramona?” Sam asked while Beau was on hold.
He shook his head. “Sally Mangle, Grant’s wife. Travis says he reached her at the hospital. She gets off at eleven and agreed to come by and answer some questions. I got the feeling she wasn’t thrilled, but most people would rather talk in the privacy of our interview room than have the sheriff show up at their place of work.”
“Hey, Rico. Sally Mangle is coming in later and I’d like you to conduct the interview. Travis told her we may have located her stolen diamond ring, so use that as a lead-in. Show her the one we found, she’ll say it’s not hers, then lead her around to questions about her work. What we really want to know is whether she would have access to benzodiazepines in the course of her work.” He paused to spell the word, and gave Rico the brand-name equivalents.
“Go soft, for now. I don’t want to spook her. We’ll check other hospital sources to verify anything she tells you. Depending on what she says, we can see what measures they have in place for accountability before we drill any harder.” He repeated what he’d said about calling, no matter what hour, if Sally Mangle should actually break down and confess.
“That would make it easy, wouldn’t it?” Sam said, when he set his phone down.
“If only it really worked that way. Seems like everybody reads too many crime stories in the paper—they all think a good lawyer will get them off, no matter what they did.” He polished off the wing in three bites and put the other piece back in the bucket. “We got any ice cream?”
Sam laughed and gathered their plates. “There’s more of that caramel if you haven’t already got into it. If that’s gone, there are brownies from the bakery.”
“Ah! A brownie sundae is just what I need.”
How did the man keep his waistline? She stored the leftovers and put the plates in the dishwasher. She fought the calorie battle all the time. He bundled back into his warmest coat and went out to the barn to be sure all was well with the two horses, even though his ranch hand, Roger, had been around early in the day to feed and water them. When he returned, he concocted his own sundae and retired to the living room, where the sounds of a football game came from the TV.
By the time Sam finished tidying the kitchen, his chair was fully reclined, the empty dessert bowl sitting on an end table, and his eyelids were drooping.
“Unless you’re only planning on a catnap, you might as well go to bed,” she told him gently. “It was an early morning.”
He roused enough to be attentive to the game on television for another thirty minutes, but when he began nodding off again, he kissed her goodnight and headed up the stairs. Sam took the dogs outside, where the thermometer on the deck read a cozy fourteen degrees. Once all were back inside, she too succumbed to the lure of an early bedtime.
By morning Sam was feeling antsy about getting back to her creations at the chocolate factory. She couldn’t believe it had been thirty-six whole hours since she’d pulled her late-night creative blitz to come up with the concepts for the pieces to fill the sample boxes for Stan Bookman. She also couldn’t believe the presentation deadline was now only two days away.
A little wave of nerves went through her as she started her truck and headed toward the Victorian in the gray light of pre-dawn. The roads held a treacherous coating of frozen slush, and she had to concentrate on her driving, although her mind wanted to go back to her chocolate creations.
The big four-wheel-drive vehicle handled the turn onto Tyler Road easily enough, and cut through the crust on top of the unbroken snow on the driveway. Wind had obviously whipped across the open fields surrounding the chocolate factory; her tire tracks from two nights ago had been obliterated. She steered up to the portico, then decided to make a path for the employees. In addition to the deadline for the Travel the World program, they would soon be falling behind on their regular orders if they weren't open for business very soon.
She backed out again, turned, made two more runs down the road to pack the snow. The employee parking area was a bit too much of a challenge for her pickup. She pulled again into her slot near the door and phoned Roger to see if he was available to come out and clear the space for her people. He assured her he could be out within a half hour, so she called Benjie and asked him to notify everyone else that the workday would begin on time.
She unlocked the back door, a little nervous about whether the new designs were as great as she’d remembered. A creativity frenzy was one thing … examining the results with the same critical eye as her customer was another.
But there on the worktable lay the light cloth she had draped to protect the racks of candy. When she lifted it, the truffles, creams, and nut clusters gleamed up at her. Her breath caught a little at the sight of the glistening decorative touches. She circled the table, seeing the pieces from all sides. They were perfect.
She felt a surge of pride. All this had happened without the magic of the wooden box or the creative genius of her mentor chocolatier, Bobul. This was her work alone.
Peru, Chile, Australia, India … She had come up with innovative flavors for each country and several designs to represent the cultures and sights Mr. Bookman’s wealthy clientele would experience in each location. Despite the fact that she’d practically been in a trance when she actually worked the chocolate, each design so clearly depicted its location, she had no trouble picking them out now. She hoped Bookman would see them the same way.
Now, she must consider presentation. How Book It Travel’s clients viewed their gift at the moment it came into their hands would be nearly as important as what they discovered inside each box, so the containers were nearly as important as the contents. She needed to come up with a unique way to make the chocolate represent the journey to each destination.
For the past week, she had reviewed every style of gift box already in her collection, and decided they were far too generic for this purpose. None of her suppliers carried anything substantially different. Sam gazed at the beautiful chocolates once again. She walked to the storeroom where—no surprise—no solution had magically appeared.
“Come on, Sam, think! You’ve got two days before he comes to see what you’ve come up with.” She paced the circular route from storeroom to kitchen, to packing room, to shipping area, up the stairs to her office, down again to the storeroom, and yet nothing came to her.
Okay, she thought. What the heck am I going to do now?
Chapter 40
Rico spent the morning with Beau, despite having been at work half the night, and they went over the video of Sally Mangle’s interview. Beau took in the obvious details first: attractive slender woman in her late thirties, blonde hair in a short style they used to call a pixie, makeup faded after a long shift at work, wearing dark blue medical scrubs and a thick down coat when she walked into the interrogation room. She draped the coat over the back of a chair and sat down with the tired air of someone who’d been on her feet all day, yet there was an appearance of anticipation about her.
“We’d told her we found a ring that might be hers,” Rico said.
Beau watched as his deputy began
the interview with the offer of coffee, water, or a soda. Sally declined. She asked about the ring.
“I’ve got someone retrieving it,” Rico said. “Before we get to that, I just need to verify a couple things your husband told us.”
He had his small notebook in hand and pretended to consult it as he flipped through a few pages.
“Grant says you and he had lunch together on the thirteenth. Can you verify that for me?”
Sally actually rolled her eyes. “Probably. We meet for lunch once or twice a week.”
“It’s important that we verify the thirteenth was the day.”
She reached for a pocket of the coat and pulled out a phone. Thumbing across icons and screens, she stared at it. “It’s on my calendar, so I’m sure of it.”
“You’re good at details,” he told her. “I suppose that’s part of your work, keeping good records.”
“Of course.”
“Tell me how that works with the drugs at the hospital. You must administer some pretty potent stuff. I assume everything has to be tracked pretty closely.”
“What?” She seemed startled at the abrupt change of subject.
“C’mon, hospital employees must ‘borrow’ medications from time to time, a little something for a headache, a remedy for a family member … There must be a system in place to be sure no one’s running a little sideline business. Drugs are pretty expensive.”
“I suppose they are. I’m not connected with the billing department.” She busied herself putting her phone away and pulling a tube of lip balm from her pocket.
“And you’ve never taken a little something from the drug cabinet for yourself?”
“No, deputy, I haven’t. How does this relate to my stolen diamond ring?”
“I’ll go check on that,” Rico said, rising. “You can just wait here.”
While he was out of the room, Sally started to apply her lip balm, but her hand shook so badly she ended up rubbing most of it on with a fingertip before putting the tube back in her pocket. Her gaze darted around the room, she drummed her fingers on the tabletop, sat forward in the chair and intertwined her fingers to keep them still.
“Seems a little edgy,” Beau commented.
“Yeah, I thought so. I watched from here until it seemed the right time to go back. I had the ring with me the whole time.” Rico patted the button-down pocket on his uniform shirt.
On the video, he was walking back into the interrogation room with the evidence bag in hand. He told Sally she couldn’t break the seal, but should look at the ring through the plastic. “Sorry, but at this point it’s still evidence in our case.”
She examined the ring in the bag and shook her head. “No. This is the same one Grant brought home. I knew the minute I saw it, this wasn’t my ring. I can’t believe he let himself get tricked like that.”
Anger flashed across her face, but Rico didn’t question further. Beau wondered if Sally was more angry with the con man or with her husband.
Rico thanked Sally for coming in and said they would be back in touch if they had further questions. She didn’t exactly seem pleased with the idea.
“I went home after she left,” Rico told Beau, “but on my way back this morning, I stopped in at the hospital and talked with the administrator. Wanted to find out what the official procedures are for handling and tracking the various medications. They literally have a book on it, a procedures manual.”
“I’ll take the condensed version, if you can give it to me,” Beau said.
Rico picked up the publication, which must have run fifty pages or more. “Basically, every pill and injection in that place is tracked from the moment it’s ordered through the pharmaceutical company, through receipt at the hospital, inventoried into the hospital pharmacy, and dispensed to the patients. They’ve got a form for everything, requisition books that are numbered and tracked, and kept under lock and key. The only personnel who are allowed to sign for the drug’s movement from one area to another are doctors, registered nurses, or pharmacists. Two signatures are required for controlled substances.”
“Sounds pretty thorough. It takes that whole book to lay it out?”
Rico rolled his eyes. “I’ve barely started reading it. What I told you is what the administrator said to me. He insisted I take the manual, I suppose to prove to us how diligent they are.”
“Well, the last thing a hospital wants is for the law to believe they’ve got a leak anywhere in their system.” Beau adjusted the lights in the room and flipped the manual open. “Based on what you’ve read about the procedures, what would you say the weak points are? We all know that in a perfect world an instruction book would keep everything on the up-and-up, but it’s not a perfect world.”
“Okay, playing a little game of what-if, let’s say it’s time for a patient’s meds to be given. A lower-ranking nurse can do it, but has to get the nurse supervisor or a doctor to sign off. Doctor has already made rounds, he or she is gone now. Nurse supervisor has an emergency situation, so the bedside nurse approaches and asks him or her to sign the authorization form. The supervisor signs it but maybe doesn’t notice the quantity written in the little space for that. Or she doesn’t know that patient’s history … maybe a higher dosage is called for in that particular case. The lower-ranking nurse takes the form to the dispensary and has it filled, pharmacist signs off. She gives the patient his proper dose, pockets the rest to take home. Repeats it often enough that she soon has a big fat lethal dose saved up.”
“Why, Rico, I’d say you’ve been hanging around those with criminal minds,” Beau teased.
Rico looked at the floor and blushed a little. “Hearing about the way these con men operate has got me looking at all the angles.”
“Hey, I’m not saying that isn’t a good thing. Plus, you’ve saved me having to read this entire procedures manual.” Beau glanced back toward the screen where they’d been watching the interview video. “The knowledge sure doesn’t get Grant Mangle off the hook, does it?”
“Neither him nor the wife. Both of them had pretty good reasons to be furious with Percy Lukinger, didn’t they?”
Beau nodded. There had been that flash of anger from Sally, along with some nerves. Grant had been both angry and embarrassed, and Beau had to admit he didn’t know either of them well enough to know how likely they might be to act upon their anger. If Sally had been stealing drugs from the hospital, how much would she need to accumulate for a lethal dose, he wondered. If questioned, she could always come up with the excuse that someone in the family had insomnia or some other ailment requiring heftier drugs than you could buy in a bottle over the counter.
Beau sent Rico to type up his notes from the interview while he went to his own office with more questions on his mind. He got out his own case notes and came up with the phone number for Dr. Ralph Plante, the pathologist who had alerted him to the fact that Percy’s death came from a toxin rather than the auto accident.
Plante came on the line almost immediately.
“Thanks for taking my call. I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”
“It’s never a bad time, just almost always a busy time.”
“I have a couple of follow-up questions on the Percy Lukinger autopsy,” Beau said, “and I’ll try to be quick with them.”
“Let me pull up the record,” Plante said. Clicks from a computer keyboard sounded in the background.
“I wonder if the tissue samples from the victim revealed the quantity of benzodiazepine he had in his system.”
“Um, yeah. Let’s see … Looks like it calculated out to about a 100-milligram dose. That’s quite high, no matter which of the brand name versions was administered.”
“And Lukinger had all this in his bloodstream at once?”
“Yes, definitely. Of course, mixed with the alcohol, it was a very lethal combination. Remember, Mr. Lukinger probably had two or three drinks in his system at the time. Slamming him with a hundre
d mils of benzos all at once … well, everything in his central nervous system would have just shut down.”
Beau flipped the page in the case file and saw the medical investigator’s notes. “Sounds like it’s a nasty way to go. I can’t imagine the sensation he would have felt.”
“Yeah. Bad. Whoever wanted to be rid of him, really did it thoroughly. There was also the head injury.”
Beau had nearly forgotten about that. He thanked Dr. Plante for his time and hung up, considering the new information. At this point, either Grant or Susan Mangle seemed to have easiest access to the murder drug. Grant admitted seeing Percy after lunch that day, but hadn’t said anything about the man having a head injury. Still, it didn’t necessarily rule out Ramona Lukinger or the Eframs. He buzzed Travis and asked for an update on the California pair.
“I found ’em, boss. Didn’t you see the note I put in your mail slot?”
Beau had to admit he’d not checked.
Travis showed up at his office door a minute later, note in hand. “Anyway, Hiram and Danny Efram did come to Taos,” he said. “Stayed at the Adobe Inn the nights of the twelfth and thirteenth. They must have gone very early—left their key in the room and no one remembers seeing them drive away. A credit card charge shows they bought gas in Gallup at 9:37 a.m. on the fourteenth.”
Beau pondered the information. The Eframs arrived the day before Percy’s death. They would have been looking for Ramona and Percy as a pair, once they discovered her ‘brother’ was actually her real husband. If they’d tracked down the couple and killed Percy, it would have given Ramona the heads-up she needed to claim his body and skip out quickly.
So, why hadn’t she left town? She must have known the Eframs had figured out the con and were after her, so why had she hung around the bakery, calling herself Missy Malone?
Chapter 41
Jorge Rodriguez wasn’t in when Beau called, and it took a few hours before he was able to speak to the bunco detective in San Diego. He began with Travis’s findings and ended by explaining that he’d never had the chance to question the Eframs.
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