Board Stiff (Mattie Winston Mysteries) (27 page)

“Damn,” Hurley mutters. He flicks a finger at the letter. “Kate says in here that she sent Emily a letter of her own. I don’t know when she mailed it, but it could arrive as soon as tomorrow. I’m going to have to tell her either tonight or tomorrow. And then I’m going to try to find Kate.”

“She made it pretty clear in her letter that she doesn’t want to be found,” I say.

“I don’t give a damn what she wants,” Hurley says, raking a hand through his hair. “I can’t believe she did this. It’s not fair to Emily, it’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to anybody. The last thing I need right now is full-time responsibility for a kid. If I’d wanted to be a father, I would’ve had kids of my own.” He drops the letter on the table as if it just burned his fingers. He leans back in his chair, wipes both hands down the side of his face, and sighs heavily. “This is so typical of Kate,” he says, clearly ticked. “She’s always been so self-centered, thinking only of herself.”

“I think you’re being a little harsh on her,” I say. “She’s dying, Hurley. Her primary concern seems to be for Emily, not for herself. Whatever relationship the two of them have built over the years is what she seems determined to have Emily remember her by, rather than some deathbed scenario.”

Hurley lunges forward so fast it makes me lurch back. He stabs a finger on the letter lying on the table. “Where did you say you found this?”

“It was underneath my bra on the floor between your bedside table and the bed. I’m pretty sure Kate must’ve left it on your bedside table, thinking you’d see it when you got home last night and went to bed.”

“Except I never went to bed. I slept on the couch all night.”

“When you and I were in the bedroom earlier today, you tossed my bra over your shoulder and it hit the table. It must have also hit the letter and they fell to the floor.”

“It’s a pretty crappy way to handle this,” Hurley says, his anger clearly not abating. “Why couldn’t she have just sat down and talked to me face-to-face? Why couldn’t she have sat down with Emily and done the same thing?” He grabs the letter up in his hand, scrunching it beneath his fingers and shaking it. “This is how she says good-bye? I hope to hell she does a better job in her letter to Emily.” He opens his hand and lets the letter drop back to the table. “Dammit!”

Clearly there will be no dessert tonight, at least not here. Hurley pays the check for our meal, stuffs the letter in his pocket, and drives me back to the police station.

“Let’s call it a night,” he says as he parks. “I need to do some paperwork and I think I’ll just stay here until I hear from Desi and can pick up Emily.”

“Do you want me to help you talk to Emily about her mother?”

Hurley thinks about this for a moment and then says, “No, I think it will be easier for her coming from me alone. Since I’ve basically been hoodwinked and duped into fatherhood, I might as well figure out how to do it. I’ll probably screw it up, but at least Emily is old enough that most of her psyche is already formed. If she turns out to be a mess, I can always blame it on Kate.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine with her.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I just don’t think I’m cut out to be a father, Winston. Between the crazy hours I keep with my job and the number of years I’ve been on my own, I don’t have the time or the patience to be a father. Or the desire for that matter.”

“You said Emily was a great kid.”

“She is. She’s smart, funny, polite, down-to-earth, all the things you want to see in a teenager . . . someone else’s teenager.”

He looks genuinely upset and it tears me up to see the hurt and worry on his face. I lean over and give him a kiss on the cheek. “I have faith in you, Steven Hurley. I know you can do this.”

He turns and gives me a wan smile. “I guess I’ll have to. The kid doesn’t have anyone else so I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

“Let me know if I can help in any way.”

“I will.”

“Do you have anything planned for tomorrow work-wise? Or should I just plan on spending the day in the office?”

“Our case is going nowhere so you might as well hang in the office until we hear something back from Madison and have a better idea of exactly what poison was used on Chase. I’m probably going to take a personal day tomorrow since I’ll have to tell Emily about her mother and I don’t know how she’s going to take it.”

“Call me after you’ve told her and let me know how it goes. I bonded with Emily a little and I might be able to help. If I can’t, I bet Hoover can.”

“Are you suggesting a little pet therapy?”

“It can’t hurt.”

He leans over and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, Winston. I’ll keep you posted.”

We get out of his car and head our separate ways, him into the police station, me to my hearse parked under the ME’s office. Driving home, I’m struck by a terrible sadness and an odd sense of loneliness. When I get home, I’m glad Hoover is there to greet me because I can use a little pet therapy of my own.

M
onday morning dawns warmer than the previous days and despite feeling exhausted, I wake up at six-thirty and can’t go back to sleep. After making a cup of coffee, I throw on a robe and take Hoover outside. He is sniffing around, and on a whim I take him to the base of the window where the Peeping Tom was the other night. I point to the ground, then squat down and pat it, and he sniffs around eagerly and then looks at me, unsure what I want him to do. Next, I walk him around to the back of the house where the footprints can still be seen and repeat the same actions. He sniffs again and this time he starts tracking, nose to the ground. He heads around the house and back to the front window where we started.

“Good boy! Go find it!” I say.

He seems to understand and he starts tracking across the yard and into the woods, his nose to the ground. I follow him and we go all the way through the woods and come out on the other side. We end up at the base of the driveway of my old, burned-up house where he walks around in circles for a minute before he sits down, looks at me, and whines. Apparently, this is where the guy parked.

“Good boy!” I say, and he thumps his tail and jumps up on me. We head back to the house, Hoover trotting along with pride, and after rewarding him with a treat, I put in a call to Izzy.

“Good morning,” I say. “Anything on your agenda for the day?”

“At the moment, my agenda is to eat the omelet Dom is fixing for me. Want some breakfast?”

“I’ll be right over.”

Five minutes later, I’m seated at the dining room table with Izzy, still in my robe. Dom is in the kitchen and the intoxicating smells of bacon, coffee, and onions fill the air.

“How did the rest of your day go yesterday?” Izzy asks me.

“It was interesting.” I tell him about the note that Kate left for Hurley and his reaction to it, leaving out the part about me finding the note and how that happened. As we’re discussing the implications of it all, Dom delivers his cooked-to-perfection cheese and onion omelets, rye toast, crisp bacon, and hash browns. I’m hungry and plowing through it, grateful my nausea seems to be gone. Hopefully, I nipped the virus in the bud, although that means I’ll have to go to the gym tonight.

“Is today the day you’re seeing Maggie again?” Izzy asks.

I nod. “This afternoon. You know, I have to say that the whole counseling thing wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“Good. Has it helped?”

“It has, I think.”

“Glad to hear it. What’s on your agenda for today? You’re welcome to take some time off if you want to make up for all the hours you put in over the weekend.”

“Arnie collected a lot of evidence yesterday so I thought I’d go in and help him process it. Hurley said he was probably going to take a personal day today to be with Emily, so after I get done with Arnie I think I’ll go over to the police station and go through the files we have on all the interviews we did at Twilight. See if anything jumps out at me.”

“Sounds reasonable, but don’t hesitate to cut out early if you need to.”

“Maybe I’ll go in a little late this morning, say around ten?”

“That will work if nothing else comes in.”

“My appointment with Maggie is at four, so I’ll probably stay in the office or at the police station until then. After that, I told Bob Richmond I’d meet him at the gym.”

“Two visits in less than a week? That’s a record, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I say with a laugh.

When I’m done eating, I thank Dom and head back to the cottage and take a leisurely shower. I try to call Hurley, but it flips straight over to voice mail so I get dressed and head to the grocery store, leaving Hoover home.

I’m able to get my food without interruption and I even manage to get mostly healthy food, including some salad makings, lots of fresh fruits and veggies, and some whole grain cereals. When I get to the frozen foods section, my willpower weakens and I succumb to the lure of some Chunky Monkey and Cookie Dough ice creams.

After taking my groceries home and sampling the ice creams to make sure they are adequate, I head for the office. I find Arnie in his lab with a stack of bagged evidence samples next to him. “Can I help you out with any of this stuff?” I ask.

“Thanks, but I’m doing okay with it. All the fingerprint data has been uploaded to AFIS and I sent the DNA stuff off to Madison. Now I’m just going through the various samples we collected from the coffee station to split them out for testing and do a microscopic exam to see if there is anything obvious in any of them.”

“If you change your mind, give me a call. I’m going to go over to the police station and wade through the interview notes from the other night.”

“That sounds exciting—not. Have fun.”

I head for the police station, a small part of me hoping that I’ll find Hurley there. When I walk in the front, the dispatcher on duty is Stephanie.

“Hey, Mattie,” she says.

“Hi, Steph. Are Detectives Hurley or Richmond here?”

She shakes her head. “Neither. Hurley took a personal day and I think Bob Richmond is on call. Larry Johnson is on duty. Do you need me to call him?”

“No, thanks. I want to look through the interview files on the Bernard Chase case that Hurley had yesterday. Do you know where they are?”

“Hurley’s desk maybe? You’re welcome to go in the back and look around.” She buzzes me through and hands me a stack of papers she takes off the fax. “You can put these on Hurley’s desk for me if you don’t mind. They came in last night.” Her phone rings then and as she takes the call I head back toward the break room.

There are four offices along the main hallway that I have to pass, one of which belongs to Chief Hanson. The other three are shared by the detectives and I know which one Hurley uses. When I pass Chief Hanson’s office I see him sitting behind his desk.

“Hey, Chief. How are things?”

“Doing good. I hear you’re on at the ME’s office again. Welcome back.”

“Thanks.”

“You and Hurley make a good team.”

“Yeah, we work well together.”
We do other things well together, too.
“I’m here to look through the interview files Hurley had on this Bernie Chase case. Is it okay if I use Hurley’s desk since he isn’t coming in today?”

“Sure. Have at it.”

“I have a question for you. Irene Keller says she talked to you some time back about how she and some others thought Bernie Chase was killing off patients at the home who were too expensive to care for.”

“Yeah, she did, but if you ask me it was nothing but some bored, paranoid folks looking for something to make their lives more interesting.”

“You looked into it?”

He shrugs. “Irene mentioned a couple recent deaths that she thought were suspicious and I looked into those, but I didn’t find anything. One was a lady who had a massive stroke that left her bedbound and three weeks after she went to Twilight she died. I talked to her doctor and told him what sort of symptoms the staff at the home said the old lady had with sweating, low blood pressure, and a fast heart beat and he said it sounded like she either had a heart attack or something called neurological shock.”

“Neurogenic shock.”

“Whatever. Anyway, her doctor said she had very bad heart disease and he wasn’t surprised by the death.”

“But no one looked into it officially?”

“No, no real need.”

“Who else did you look into?”

“A man who had been wasting away for a while and finally became bedbound. He died a few weeks later, but his doctor said it was a natural progression of things.”

“There wasn’t anything strange about his death?”

“He went the same way as the lady, sweaty, fast heart rate, dropping blood pressure. The doctor said those symptoms are classic for heart failure and that the guy’s heart just finally gave out.”

“Any others?”

“There might have been. I don’t recall now. But I found no evidence of anything unusual and I did talk to the doctors of these patients.”

“I see.”

He narrows his eyes at me, trying, no doubt, to determine if I’m annoyed with him and the situation. “Do you feel like I missed something?”

“I don’t know. Probably not,” I say. “But I might take a second look at things just to be thorough.”

“I’m sure you’ll be wasting your time, but have at it if you want.”

I leave him, sensing that I’ve worn out my welcome. The break room is surprisingly clean, the table crumbless, the countertops clear, the coffee pot cleaned and drying next to the sink. I start a pot of coffee and then head for Hurley’s office.

On the corner of his desk is the pile of folders. I settle into his chair and Hurley’s smell wafts up from it. And just like that I’m hit by a wave of nausea.

I sit there for a few seconds convincing myself that it’s an anomaly, and eventually my stomach settles down.

I glance at the papers Steph gave me from the fax machine and see that they’re financial statements for the Twilight Home. Since I doubt I’ll be able to understand them, I set them aside and grab the first file off the pile.

Bob Richmond’s notes are well organized, precise, and surprisingly easy to read. He has nice penmanship. He also has a flair for the narrative and reading some of the notes is like reading a short story. It also reveals what a Peyton Place the Twilight Home is. He has dug up scandals and rumors of unrequited love, late-night trysts, contraband food, and the whole pot thing I heard about from Randolph. But based on Richmond’s notes, Randolph wasn’t totally honest with me. Fake pot isn’t the only thing he’s dealing according to one patient. Randolph also had a secret stash of Cialis and Viagra that he got from his doctor and was selling to other residents. Since they didn’t find the pills when they searched his room, he either had them on him somewhere, or he was out of them. I remember the pills we found in Bernie’s safe and wonder if that’s where he got his from. Maybe he found Randolph’s stash and took them away from him and locked them up for safekeeping. Maybe they weren’t Bernie’s pills at all.

My cell phone rings and I grab it, thinking it’s Hurley. But it’s Arnie.

“I found something weird in the stuff we collected from the coffee area in Bernie’s office,” he says excitedly.

“What?”

“Well, I figured if the coffee was the delivery system for the poison, then anything that went into the coffee was a candidate, too. So just for grins, I decided to look at the sugar substitute under the microscope. That fake sweetener has a very characteristic appearance, sort of a lacy look, and while I saw plenty of that, I also saw some other stuff. It looked like there was a mixture of two different things in there. Just to be sure, I got some of the same sugar substitute from Izzy’s office and compared it with what came out of the box in Bernie’s office. There’s definitely something mixed in Bernie’s that doesn’t belong. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m isolating it and running some tests.”

“Okay, let me know if you come up with anything.”

As I disconnect the call, Stephanie walks in wearing her headset. “This just came over the fax,” she says, tossing a sheet of paper on the desk and then leaving.

It’s a list of patients who have died at Twilight in the past two years. There are twenty-two of them, nearly one for every month. It seems high given the number of beds in the facility, but I’ll have to compare it to the national and regional rates. I set the sheet off to one side and see Hurley’s little notebook, the one he always carries in his pocket, sitting by his desk phone. I pick it up and flip through the pages to the most recent notes and see he has a small to-do list. The last item on it is to call Vonda Lincoln’s lawyer.

I grab my phone, pull up my list of contacts, and find the numbers for the lawyer that I put in last night when I was with Vonda. I strike pay dirt with the first number.

A secretary answers with, “Wentworth Law, may I help you?”

“Is Malcolm in?”

“Which one, Junior or Senior?”

Figures
. I decide to take a gamble. “The one who serves Mr. Bernard Chase.”

“That would be Malcolm Sr. May I ask who’s calling?”

“My name is Mattie Winston. I’m a medicolegal investigator with the medical examiner’s office in Sorenson and I’m investigating Mr. Chase’s death.”

“Malcolm Sr. isn’t in now. Can I take a message?”

“Yes, please ask him to call me and tell him it’s urgent.” I give her my phone number and hang up.

Since I’m in wait mode, I go back to skimming through the interview notes. Forty minutes later, I reach the last page in the file. It’s the drawing Emily did of the man who was peeking in my window at her the other night. I realize that with the new information we have about Kate and her real reason for leaving, odds are that man wasn’t there to spy on Emily. That means he was there to spy on me. I study the picture, still nagged by the feeling that something about it is vaguely familiar. I take it up front to Stephanie and have her make me a copy of it along with the lists containing the names of the staff and patients at the Twilight Home. I stuff all the lists in my purse and after straightening up Hurley’s desk, I head for the Twilight Home. Most of the names on the lists have been crossed off, but there are a few remaining and I figure it can’t hurt to talk with them.