He’s probably down the hall at the nurses’ station. They don’t put that kid down for a minute. He’s going to get spoiled with so much attention.
Each day, Eliza’s room morphed further into baby land. The walls were now covered in moons, stars and rainbows. A baby lamp had been added and a giant black and white panda sat on the floor next to the crib. With each nursing shift, additional baby items were left by well-meaning staff. Lourdes Castro finally put a stop to it because there was simply no room to move.
Methodically, Jenny searched Eliza’s room, opening every drawer and closet, looking for some kind of amorphous clue. After searching for fifteen minutes, she was chilly and buttoned her sweater and thought to check Eliza’s temperature. She placed the back of her hand on the immobile woman’s forehead. Eliza’s skin was cool to the touch and Jenny looked around for something to cover her patient. Opening the closet, she saw a pink blanket way up on the top shelf. She pushed a chair over, climbed up and reached for the blanket. After she pulled it from the high shelf, she spotted a small medicine bottle wedged way in the back in a gap between the shelf and the rear of the closet wall. Reaching in, she pulled out an unopened bottle of liquid medication. The label was clear and she knew what the drug was.
Why the hell would this be in here? Can it be used for something else?
She pulled out her phone and searched on the uses for the drug in the bottle and could find only one reason to have it.
That’s the second time this week I found something that wouldn’t be used for this patient population.
She put the bottle of liquid into her pocket and looked around to see if there was anything else she had missed. She searched every inch of Eliza’s room a second time but found nothing more.
I’ve got to talk to Dr. Crawford tomorrow. None of this makes any sense.
37
When Jenny got to her apartment that night it was late, but her boyfriend, Danny, was waiting outside for her with a pizza, diet coke, a box of glazed donuts and a kiss.
‘I am so glad to see you,’ said a smiling Jenny, returning the kiss. ‘Another long and crazy day.’
‘I’m told pizza can fix anything,’ he said, waving the box as the two walked into her apartment and turned on the lights.
Flipping on the television to watch the news, they ate without much conversation.
‘This is unusual,’ said Danny, his mouth full of pizza.
‘What?’
‘You’re not talking. That almost never happens.’
‘I’m tired. Long and weird day.’
Jenny took another bite of her slice and drifted off in thought.
‘Supposed to get a lot of rain this weekend,’ said Danny, trying to make conversation. ‘I was thinking that maybe we could go…’
‘I think the man who impregnated Eliza Stern didn’t mean for it to happen. He just wanted to get his rocks off and go on his way. But what if, later on, he realized she was pregnant and it would lead back to him?’
‘I was wondering how long it would take you to get on to this topic. Why don’t we talk about something else for a change?’ said Danny.
‘It must mean he works at the hospital or at least he’s there all the time. What if it’s a nurse, an aide or even a doctor? What if it’s someone I know?’
‘If it was a nurse or a doctor, of course you’d know them,’ said Danny.
‘Today, I was poking around in Eliza Stern’s room.’
‘Why are you doing that? That’s what the cops are there for.’
‘Stay with me for a second,’ said Jenny. ‘So, I’m in her room. Just looking around to see if there was anything that was missed.’
‘You think you’re better at this than the police?’
‘I’m a medical professional and they’re not,’ said Jenny. ‘There are things I would notice that the lay person wouldn’t, not even a cop. While I was in Eliza’s room, I noticed she was cold, so I climbed up on a stool to get a pink blanket from the top of her closet. Something glimmered and I found this.’ Jenny held out a small medicine bottle in her hand for Danny to see. ‘You know what this is?’
‘I don’t but I know you’re going to tell me.’
‘It’s Pitocin,’ said Jenny matter-of-factly.
She moved closer to her boyfriend and continued talking. ‘Pitocin can be used for a number of things but one of the main things is to induce labor,’ she said. ‘What if the person who had sex with Eliza Stern realized she was pregnant. Then, what if he tried to induce an abortion to get rid of the baby so it couldn’t be traced back to him.’
‘You’d have to be a medical person to know how to do that,’ said Danny, a look of disgust on his face. ‘I certainly wouldn’t know how to pull that off.’
‘What if it was Dr. Horowitz?’ said Jenny, her eyes bugging out. ‘He’s always hitting on all the nurses and aides. He even flirts with the college volunteers. He’d know how to administer and use Pitocin. That makes total sense and it would explain everything. I’m sure the last thing Steve Horowitz expected was Eliza getting pregnant.’
‘You’re jumping to conclusions without much information. Besides the baby wasn’t aborted,’ said Danny. ‘The baby is alive.’
‘Maybe whoever got Eliza pregnant was going to use the Pitocin but chickened out,’ said Jenny, on a roll. ‘Or maybe they got fired or got a new job and figured they were in the clear, long gone by the time the baby came around.’
‘Didn’t you tell me that you and Horowitz once had a thing?’
‘It was nothing,’ said Jenny coldly. ‘Horowitz has a thing with every woman on staff under forty.’
‘Did you tell the police about the Pitocin?’
‘Not yet, I discovered it right before I left work,’ said Jenny. ‘I’ll tell Dr. Crawford in the morning. I kind of feel sorry for her — she’s got a lot on her plate right now.’
‘If you’re right about this, it could be huge,’ said Danny.
‘Maybe it wasn’t Horowitz, but I’ll bet money it’s someone on the medical staff at Oceanside Manor or Oceanside Medical. I know the cops were looking at maintenance people and gardeners, but in order to use Pitocin and induce an abortion without killing the patient, you’d have to really know what you were doing. There would be a lot of blood.’
38
Day 9
When McQ and Blade arrived at work in the morning, there was already an urgent message from Angela Crawford saying she needed to see them immediately and asked if they could all meet in her office at 9:15. After checking in with the chief, the two detectives drove across town to Oceanside Manor.
At ten after nine, Vera sat them in Angela’s office and the two detectives waited patiently for the administrator to arrive.
‘Looks like her highness had more important things to do today,’ said Blade, looking at her watch. ‘It’s 9:41. She did say to be here at 9:15, right?’
‘Calm down, Anita,’ said McQ. ‘The lady is clearly frazzled. On top of everything else, she has this whole facility to run. She’s under a lot of pressure.’
‘Look at you, Mr. Magnanimous,’ said Blade, laying on the drawl. ‘Since when did you become so patient and less parsimonious with your valuable time?’
‘Magnanimous. Parsimonious. A few new scrabble words, perhaps?’ said McQ with a grin. ‘Has Eve been making you practice with your vocabulary flash cards again?’
Blade stuck her tongue out at her partner. A moment later, there was a commotion outside the office, it was Angela barking orders at staff. ‘Schedule a call tomorrow afternoon with Bob Beckmann, any time after two. Cancel my lunch today and reschedule it for next week. Hold all my calls until the detectives leave.’
A moment later, Angela burst into her office carrying several tote bags filled with files. ‘Detectives, I’m sorry for being so late. The Stern situation has completely dominated my life this past week. Things have been unfortunately falling through the cracks.’
‘You called us Dr. Crawford, so we
’re here,’ said McQ.
‘Any developments on the case since we last talked?’ said Angela.
‘Nothing significant since yesterday. We’re still interviewing people,’ said Blade.
‘You said there was something important you wanted to talk about,’ said McQ.
Angela reached into her bag and pulled out a small clear bottle, the kind used for drawing medicine with a syringe, and placed it on her desk.
The two detectives stared at the bottle and looked at each other and shrugged.
‘Do you know what this is?’ asked Angela.
McQ leaned over and picked up the small bottle and his ears started to itch, but he uncharacteristically ignored the feeling.
‘The label says “Pitocin,”’ said McQ. ‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘Jenny, the nurse who is doing all the research for us, found it yesterday in Eliza Stern’s room. It was stuck in the back of a closet shelf. She gave it to me early this morning.’
‘What is Pitocin used for?’ asked Blade.
‘It’s most often used to start labor but it can also be used to induce an abortion,’ said Angela. ‘Jenny thinks that the man who raped Eliza might have been trying to get rid of the evidence linking him to the baby. That’s her theory, and I think she could be right.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Blade. ‘Y’all think the perp had his way with Eliza, later he realized she was pregnant, and tried to get rid of the baby by inducing an abortion?’
‘That’s the working theory,’ said Angela. ‘It makes sense, don’t you think?’
‘It would mean whoever did it wasn’t an occasional or one-time visitor,’ said McQ.
‘That’s correct, detective,’ said Angela. ‘If Jenny’s right, whoever did this had regular access and had been around for a while and knew they’d be able to get back in and administer the Pitocin.’
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ said McQ, scratching his head. ‘Could the Pitocin have been in Eliza’s room for some completely benign random reason?’
‘In a regular hospital maybe, but not here in Oceanside Manor,’ said Angela, shaking her head. ‘All of our patients are significantly disabled. No one is having babies here. Pitocin is only used in reproductive medicine.’
‘What about visiting medical students or interns?’ asked Blade. ‘Couldn’t one of them have had it in their pockets and dropped it? Maybe one of the aides or cleaning people just picked it up and stuck it in the place Jenny found it.’
‘After what we’ve all been through this past week,’ said Angela, ‘anything is possible.’
McQ took the vial of Pitocin and bagged it. ‘Maybe we can still get a print off of it,’ he said.
‘Don’t forget, we still need Frank Farwell’s DNA,’ said Blade. ‘If he’s a match, it blows a hole in your hypothesis. If he was in South America when Eliza gave birth, he couldn’t have administered the drug.’
‘That’s true,’ said Angela, making a face. ‘I video chatted with him to get some advice right after I delivered the baby. He was definitely in Ecuador. I had the pleasure of watching him wolf down some disgusting street sandwich covered in red sauce, most of which ended up on his face.’
‘There’s clearly no love lost between you and Farwell,’ said Blade. ‘Were you able to reach him yesterday to inform him we want his DNA sample?’
Angela nodded. ‘It wasn’t pretty. He went ballistic when I told him what you wanted.’ She smiled. ‘That was the only happy moment of my day yesterday. Frank calmed down after I told him all the hospital board members were asked as well. He only agreed to co-operate because he had no choice, not because it was the right thing to do.’
When they got back to the police station, McQ reached out to the FBI to arrange for someone at the U.S. Consulate in Guayaquil, Ecuador to meet up with Frank Farwell the following week and get his sample and have it shipped back to the United States.
39
Jenny had met briefly with Angela at 7:45 that morning and had given her boss the small vial of Pitocin she had found in Eliza Stern’s closet. She didn’t mention the vitamin and nutrient order changes on Eliza’s charts. She wanted to do a little more digging before she presented her findings. By 8:45, Jenny was back at work in the little supply room. She took out the old paper change order for Eliza Stern’s vitamins and nutrients and spent the next hour poring over papers in the remaining bins and cabinets. Finding nothing further about Eliza’s medication change, she decided it was time to call Angela and let her know what she had found. She wasn’t sure if it was anything, but she thought it might be something.
The phone on Angela’s desk rang just as three corporate attorneys had arrived to walk her through the legal ramifications of the Eliza Stern situation. She signaled for them to come into her office while she picked up the ringing phone. Her assistant, Vera, had an emergency root canal that morning, and Angela was on her own.
‘Angela Crawford,’ she barked into the phone while motioning for the three lawyers to sit down.
‘Dr. Crawford, it’s Jenny.’
‘I’m about to start a meeting in my office,’ said Angela quietly. ‘Can I call you back later?’
‘It’s just that I found something kind of odd. Can you come down to 3 West, I need to show you something,’ said Jenny. ‘I’m in the little supply room, you know the one, right next to the stairwell. I found this document because I got hungry yesterday and started looking for something to eat and—’
‘I’ve got people sitting in my office,’ said Angela brusquely, rolling her eyes for the attorneys’ benefit.
‘There was a weird change in Eliza Stern’s protocols. Somebody added a bunch of things to her meds last spring,’ said Jenny. ‘I need to show you.’
Angela smiled at the three hospital lawyers in dark suits sitting in front of her.
‘Jenny, can you sit tight?’ she said half-whispering. ‘I should be free in about two hours. As soon as my meeting here finishes. I’ll come down to see you.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll try to wrap things up here as quickly as I can,’ said Angela. ‘And thanks for being so thorough. I didn’t mean to sound abrupt before. I appreciate everything you’ve been doing. Do me a favor, don’t say anything to anyone until you show me what you have, okay? We don’t need any more rumors circulating until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.’
‘I won’t say a word.’
With two hours to kill before her meeting with Angela, Jenny looked around for more schedule changes. The more she thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed.
It makes no sense, unless…
40
Cracking open the stairwell door, the intruder took one last look up and down the halls to make sure no one was around. Whipping out a syringe, the needle was stuck into a bottle containing clear liquid and drawn into the syringe’s vial. When it was completely full, and the air was squeezed out with a squirt, the cap was replaced. The injection device was placed in a side pocket. A bottle of ether and a terry cloth rag were in the other side pocket along with a small but heavy bronze statue, just in case the ether didn’t do the trick. The intruder left the stairwell and quickly walked across the hall to the door of the small supply room.
With her back to the door, Jenny O’Hearn was deeply engrossed in thought while trying to absorb all the new information she had discovered. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t hear the soft swoosh of the hospital door to the supply room open or the silent footsteps of the intruder creeping up behind her. She only realized someone else was in the room when the gloved hand covered her mouth and she smelled something noxiously sweet.
The smell was followed by the sensation of falling. She grabbed for the hand that covered her mouth as her legs buckled from underneath and everything went dark.
41
Angela’s meeting with the lawyers ended sooner than anticipated. She had wrapped the meeting up early because she had other fires to put out and suggested they reconve
ne the next day. Minutes after the lawyers departed, she answered a call from Bob Beckmann. She looked at her watch while Beckmann droned on about how a hospital should be run. She yessed him to death to shorten the pointless conversation so she could get down to the supply room and see what Jenny wanted to show her. It had already been more than two hours since the young nurse had called her.
‘I understand, Bob,’ said Angela, trying to get off the phone. ‘I can assure you we’re doing everything possible. I’ve met with the lawyers and with the PR group and I’ve got everything under control. Everyone on staff has made themselves completely available to the police. I’m confident we’ll soon figure out who did this and why.’
‘I already know why. You’ve got a pervert running around over there.’
‘I’ve got a 12:30 budget meeting that’s just about to start,’ Angela said, lying to get off the call. A moment later Beckmann mercifully hung up on her as he always did and Angela went to find Jenny. She walked down the halls from the east wing over to the west, passing several nursing stations.
‘Good afternoon, Dr. Crawford,’ could be heard every few yards. ‘Good afternoon,’ Angela replied. She took the elevator up to the third floor. When she got to the nurses’ station on 3 West, Lourdes Castro was on duty. Angela inquired about a few different patients and got a status update on one patient who had been in a fair amount of distress the night before.
‘Mr. Wong is okay today,’ said Lourdes. ‘Last night something was off, but he seems fine now.’
‘How’s our baby?’ said Angela.
‘He’s wonderful,’ said Lourdes, her face breaking into a smile. ‘There’s a pediatrician from the hospital checking him out right now in Eliza’s room. At least Eliza’s baby is thriving.’
‘I’ll stop by and see him and Eliza after I meet with Jenny,’ said Angela. ‘Can you show me where the small supply room is that Jenny is working in? She wanted to show me something.’
Without Her Consent Page 14
