The Oath (10 page)

“You know who Tim Markham is?”

Hardy nodded. “He got hit by a car yesterday, then died in the hospital.”

“That’s right. I was staff physician at the ICU when he died. And he was fucking my wife.”

“So you’re worried that the police might think you got an unexpected opportunity and killed him?”

“I don’t think that’s impossible.”

“But you didn’t?”

Kensing held Hardy’s gaze. “No.”

“Were you tempted?” Trying to lighten things up.

He almost broke a smile. “I used to fantasize about it all the time, except in my version, it was always much more painful. First I’d break his kneecaps, maybe slash an Achilles tendon, cut his balls off. Anything that would make him suffer more than he did.” He shook his head in disappointment. “There really is no justice, you know that?”

Hardy thought he maybe knew it better than Dr. Kensing. “But justice or no,” he said, “you’re worried.” It wasn’t a question.

He nodded somberly. “If the police start asking about Tim. I can just hear me: ‘Yeah, I hated him. You’d hate him, too. I’m glad he’s dead.’ I don’t think so.”

Hardy didn’t think so, either, but all of this was really moot. “Let me put your mind to rest a little. It’s my understanding that Markham died from his injuries, and if that’s the case, you’re not involved in any crime.”

“What if somebody says I didn’t do enough to save him? Is there such a thing as malicious malpractice or something like that? As a homicide issue?”

Hardy shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it. Why?”

“Because some homicide inspector named Bracco came by yesterday. And they’re doing the autopsy today.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. They autopsy everybody.”

“No they don’t. Especially if you die in the ICU after surgery. We did a PM at the hospital and I signed off on the death certificate—massive internal trauma from blunt force injury—but they hauled him off downtown anyway.”

“He died of a hit and run,” Hardy explained. “That’s a homicide, so they do an autopsy. Every time.”

But the doctor had another question. “Okay, but last night I met Bracco, checking out my car at Markham’s place.”

“Bracco?” Hardy shook his head, perplexed. “You sure he’s San Francisco homicide, not hit and run? I don’t know him.”

“That’s what he said. He had a badge.”

“And he was checking out your car? Why were you at Markham’s house anyway?”

“I knew Carla, his wife. I thought it would be appropriate to go by and give my condolences, to see if there was anything I could do.” He let out a sigh. “You can’t help it. You feel somehow responsible.”

“So what was this cop doing with your car?”

Staring around the bar as though wondering how he got there, Kensing considered a moment, then came back to Hardy. “I think he was checking to see if it looked like my car had been in an accident, if I’d hit Markham. There were some other people there, too, before I left, visiting with Carla, other cars. I got the impression he had checked every one of them.”

This seemed unlikely on its face. But then Hardy flashed back to the talk he’d had with Glitsky during their latest walk. The car police. This Bracco must have been one of the new clowns that was taking so much abuse in the homicide detail. “Well, in any event, from what I’m hearing, it doesn’t sound like you’ve got any real problem here. You didn’t kill him.”

“But he died under my supervision, and it wasn’t any secret I hated him.”

“So, one more time, did you kill him?”

“No.”

“He died of his injuries, right? Did you make them worse? No? So, look, you’re fine.” Clearly, the message still wasn’t getting all the way through, so Hardy continued.

“Let me ask you this. What were the odds Markham was going to die even if you did everything right?”

“Which I did.”

“Granted, but not the question.”

The doctor gave it some real thought. “Statistically, once you’re in the ICU, only maybe two in ten get out alive.”

Truly surprised by the figure, Hardy sat back on the couch. “That’s all? Two in ten?”

Kensing shrugged. “Maybe three. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s not as high as most people think.”

“So the odds are, at best, you’d say thirty percent that Markham would have survived, even if you did everything that could have been done.”

“Which I did. But yes, roughly thirty percent.”

“So that leaves it as a seventy percent chance that the hit and run would have killed him, no matter what any doctor did or didn’t do, am I right?” Hardy came forward on the couch. “Here’s the good news. Even if you made a mistake—not saying you did, remember—whoever ran him down can’t use malpractice as a defense in his trial. Someone charged with homicide is specifically excluded from using the defense that the doctor could have saved the victim.”

Kensing’s eyes briefly showed some life. “You’d think I would have heard that before. Why is that?”

“Because if it wasn’t, every lawyer in the world would begin his defense by saying that it wasn’t his client shooting his wife four times in the heart that killed her. It was the doctors who couldn’t save her. It was their fault, not his client’s.”

Kensing accepted this information with, it seemed, a mixture of relief and disbelief. “But there wasn’t any malpractice here.” He spoke matter-of-factly. “Really,” he added.

“I believe you. I’m just saying I can’t see where you’ve got any kind of criminal charge looking at you. What put Markham there in the first place was someone running him down in a car. That’s who this guy Bracco’s looking for, the driver of the car.” But an earlier phrase that had nagged suddenly surfaced. “Did you say you
knew
Mrs. Markham?”

Kensing’s shoulders slumped visibly as the world seemed to settle on him. He looked down at the scarred hardwood floor, then back up. “You don’t know? That’s the other thing.”

Hardy waited.

“Apparently something happened last night.” He paused. “She’s dead. And the rest of her family, too.”

“Lord.” Hardy suddenly felt pinned to the sofa.

Kensing continued. “It went around the offices sometime late this morning. I was seeing patients and didn’t hear until about noon. Then, a little after that, Bracco called to make sure I’d be around. He wanted to come by and talk about it.”

“So you talked to him today, too?”

Kensing shook his head. “It might have been a mistake, but I had my receptionist tell him I wasn’t in. Pico called about the same time with his shark. I don’t see patients Wednesday afternoon anyway, and I didn’t want to talk to the police until I could sort some of this out. So I came over here, to the aquarium, and essentially hid out, walking Francis—”

“Francis?”

“The shark. Pico named it Francis. So I just hung out until I’d come up with a plan, which was get a lawyer. And Pico knew you.” He made a face, apologetic and confused. “So here we are. And now what?”

Hardy nodded and sat back. Remembering his pint, he reached for it and took a drink. “Well, you’re going to talk to the police, whether you want to or not.”

“So what do I tell them about my wife if they ask?”

Hardy had already answered that, but this was the beginning of hand-holding time. “I’d just tell the truth and try not to panic. But if they look at all, they’ll know about Markham and your wife, right? So be straightforward and deal with it. It doesn’t mean you killed anybody.”

Kensing let the reality sink in. “Okay. It’s not going to matter if they’re looking for the driver of the hit-and-run car anyway, right?”

“That’s how I see it.” Hardy looked across into Kensing’s face. His eyes were hollow with fatigue. “Are you all right?”

He managed a weak chuckle. “I’m just tired, but then again, I’m always tired,” he said. “I’ve been tired for fifteen years. If I wasn’t exhausted beyond human endurance, I wouldn’t recognize myself.”

Hardy leaned back into the couch and realized he wasn’t exactly in the mood for dancing, himself. “But still, you’re out on your afternoon off walking sharks for Pico?”

“Yeah, I know,” Kensing said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, either. I just do it.”

“That was me, too.” Hardy had walked his own sharks at the low point of his life, at the end of a decade of sleepwalk following the death of his son Michael, his divorce from Jane. It made no more sense to him then than it did to Kensing now. But for some reason walking his sharks had seemed to mean
something.
And in a world otherwise full of nothing, that was something to cling to.

Both men stood up. Hardy gave Kensing his card and along with it a last bit of advice. “You know, they might just show up at work or your house. They might knock on your door with a warrant or a subpoena. If any of that happens, say nothing. Don’t let them intimidate you. You get the phone call.”

Kensing’s mouth dropped a fraction of an inch. He blew out heavily, shaking his head. “This is starting to sound like serious hardball.”

“No. Hardball’s a game.” Hardy might be all for client reassurance, but he didn’t want Kensing to remain under the illusion that any part of a homicide investigation was going to be casual. “But from what I’ve heard, we’re okay. You weren’t driving the car, and that’s what killed him. His wife has nothing to do with you, right? Right. So the main thing is tell the truth, except leave out the part about the kneecaps.”

J
ohn Strout worked through his lunchtime conducting the autopsy on Tim Markham. The damage done to the body from its encounter with the hit-and-run vehicle and then the garbage can was substantial. The skull was fractured in two places and multiple lacerations scored what the medical examiner thought might have been an unusually handsome face in life—a broad brow, a strong jawline with a cleft chin.

Markham had been struck on the back left hip bone, which broke on the impact, along with its attached femur. Apparently, the body snapped back for an instant against the car’s hood or windshield, and this might have accounted for one of the skull fractures. The other probably occurred, Strout surmised, when the body ended its short flight. The right shoulder had come out of its socket and three ribs on the right side were broken.

Among the internal organs, besides the digestive tract, only the heart, the left lobe of the lung, and the left kidney escaped injury. The right lung had collapsed, and the spleen, liver, and right kidney had all been damaged to greater or lesser degrees. Strout, with forty years of medical experience, was of the opinion that it was some kind of miracle that Markham had survived to make it to the emergency room. He thought that blood loss or any number of the internal injuries, or the shock of so many of them at once, should have been enough by themselves to cause death.

But Strout was a methodical and careful man. Even if Tim Markham hadn’t been an important person, the medical examiner wasn’t putting his signature on any formal document until he was satisfied that he’d as precisely as humanly possible identified the principal cause of death. To that end, he had ordered the standard battery of tests on blood and tissue samples. While he waited for those results, he began a more rigorous secondary examination of the injuries to the internal organs.

A particularly impressive hematoma on the back of the liver was commanding his complete attention, but he was subliminally aware of his assistant Joyce making her way back through the length of the morgue. When she stopped next to him and hovered, he continued with his examination for a moment, then drawled, “This here could’a done it by its lone self.” Then, looking up and seeing her expression of worried concern, he pulled away from his work. “Is something wrong, darlin’?”

Joyce was new to the staff, but not as new as the equipment they’d recently bought to upgrade the lab. For the past few days, Strout had been supervising Joyce as she conducted tests to calibrate these machines, which ran sophisticated scans on blood and tissues. Since he had Tim Markham’s body on the slab this afternoon, he’d given Joyce samples from his body.

Now she appeared extremely nervous, and for a moment Strout thought she must have broken one of the expensive new toys. “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad,” he told her. “What’s the problem?”

She held up a slip of paper, the results from the lab tests she’d been running. “I don’t think I could have done this test right. I mean, the machine…” She let the thought hang.

Strout took the paper and squinted at the numbers, saw what she was showing him, and pulled off his sanitary gloves. “That the right number?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you. Could that be right? I ran it twice and I think I must have done something wrong.”

His eyes went to her face, then back to the paper, which he now took in his hand and studied with great care. “This is from Mr. Markham’s blood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dang,” he whispered, mostly to himself.

From the morgue, Strout walked down the outside corridor that connected his office with the back door of the Hall of Justice. A biting afternoon breeze had come up, but he barely noted it. After passing through the guards and the metal detector, he decided to bypass the elevators. Instead, he turned directly right to the stairs, which he took two at a time. Glitsky wasn’t in his office. As was the norm in the middle of the day, there were only a couple of inspectors pulling duty in the detail, and neither had seen the lieutenant all day. Strout hesitated a second, asked the inspectors to have Abe call him when he got in, then turned on his heel and hit the stairway again.

One floor down, he got admitted to the DA’s sanctum—hell, he’d come all this way, he wanted to talk to
somebody
—and in another minute was standing in front of Treya Ghent’s desk, asking if Clarence Jackman was available in his room next door. Somethin’ pretty interestin’ had come up. But even before she answered, her look told him he guessed it wasn’t going to be his lucky day. “He’s been at meetings all morning, John, and then scheduled at other ones all afternoon. That’s what DAs really do, you know. They don’t do law. They go to meetings.” Strout considered Ms. Ghent—or was it Mrs. Glitsky?—a very handsome, dark-skinned mulatto woman with a few drops of Asian or Indian blood mixed in somewhere, and now she smiled at him helpfully. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

He thought a minute. “Do you know where Abe’s got to?”

She shook her head no. “He left the house this morning with one of his inspectors. I haven’t heard from him since. Why?” Although she knew the answer to that. Strout wanted to see her husband because he was head of homicide. There was no doubt that the “somethin’ pretty interestin’” he’d referred to wasn’t a hot stock tip.

The lanky gentleman sighed, then sidestepped and, after asking her permission, let himself down onto the waiting chair by the side of the door. “Got to catch my breath a little. I came up by the stairs, which at my age ain’t always recommended.”

“It must have been important,” Treya said, she hoped with some subtlety.

Not that Strout needed the prompt. He was fairly itching to get it out. “You recall the discussion we all had the other day over to Lou’s about the Parnassus Group?” Of course she did. Mr. Jackman was still mulling over his options. “Well, you just watch. It’s goin’ to get a lot more interestin’ in a New York minute.”

In a few sentences, Strout had brought her to the crux of it. When he’d finished, she said, “Potassium? What does that mean?”

“It means the hit-and-run car didn’t kill him, ’tho he might’a died from those injuries eventually if they’d just left him alone. But they didn’t.”

“It couldn’t have been an accident? Somebody grabbing the wrong needle?”

He shrugged. “Anything’s possible, I s’pose. But on purpose or not, he got loaded up full of potassium, and the thing is, that can look pretty natural even if someone does an autopsy. So I’m thinkin’ you might know where your husband might be. He’s goin’ to want to know.”

When Jackman got the news about the potassium, he asked Treya to patch Abe in his car and have him come to his office as soon as he arrived back downtown. Then he’d called Marlene Ash and John Strout, both of whom had replied to the summons and were here now, too.

It was 6:45, and the freshening afternoon breeze had transformed itself into a freezing gale, the howl of which was easily audible even in the almost hermetically sealed DA’s office.

As Jackman stood at his office window looking down at the still-congested traffic below him on Bryant Street, the first large drops of rain, flung with great force, seemed to explode onto the glass in front of him. Unconsciously, he backed a step away.

He was aware of the hum of urgent shoptalk behind him. The discovery about the potassium had been extraordinary enough, but when Glitsky had finally responded to Treya’s call and told her where he’d been all day and what had happened to the Markham family, a sense of impending crisis seemed to wash through the Hall of Justice like a tsunami. At almost the same moment that Abe told Treya about the Markham family, word of the tragedy hit the streets and the calls started coming in to Jackman’s office from all quarters—newspapers, television, radio, the mayor’s office, the Board of Supervisors, the chief of police.

Just as Jackman turned away from the window, Glitsky appeared in his doorway. “Abe, good. Come on in.”

The lieutenant touched Treya’s arm, nodded around the room. Jackman sat on the front of his desk, facing them, and wasted no time on preliminaries. “So we got a whole prominent family dead in a twelve-hour period. The man’s company has the city’s contract for health care, and it’s damn near broke. I’m predicting media madness short term, and long term? God knows what chaos if Parnassus can’t recover. Anybody disagree with me?” He knew nobody would, and he clearly expected the same unanimity with his next question. “Does anybody here have any ideas about how we’re going to characterize these developments? I’m going to need some good answers when people start asking.”

The scar through Glitsky’s frown was pronounced. He cleared his throat. “We say we’re looking into it. No further comment.”

“I thought that would be your position.”

“It’s the only position, Clarence.” Glitsky, still slightly shell-shocked from his day at Markham’s home, didn’t know where the DA was going with this meeting, why it was being held at all. “It’s also the truth,” he added.

“As far as it goes, yes it is. But I’m thinking we might want to help people decide how they want to think about this. All of it. I think we want to say right up front that Tim Markham was murdered.”

Glitsky glanced at the faces around the room. At this point, the conversation seemed to be about him and Jackman. “Do we know he was murdered?”

“We know what happened, Abe,” Marlene interjected. “It’s obvious.”

“I hate obvious,” Glitsky replied evenly. “Couldn’t it have been an accidental overdose? Was he on potassium anyway for some reason?” He faced Strout. “Couldn’t somebody have just made a mistake in the hospital?”

The coroner nodded. “Could’ve happened.”

But Jackman didn’t like that answer and he snorted. “Then why’d the wife kill herself?”

“Who said she killed herself?” Glitsky asked.

“That’s the preliminary report I heard,” Jackman said.

“You know why they call it ‘preliminary,’ Clarence? Because it’s not final. It might not be true. We really don’t know anything yet about the wife and kids, that whole situation—”

“Sergeant Langtry told me it was clearly a murder/suicide, Abe. Just like many he’d seen before. And you, too, isn’t that right?”

“There might be some similarities, but there are also differences. It’s just plain smarter if we don’t say anything until we know.”

But Jackman was pacing in front of his desk, commanding the room with his presence. “I may know what’s plain smarter, too, Abe. I may even agree with you. But humor me. Other inquiring minds are going to want to know—the press, the mayor’s office, you can guess—and they’re going to ask me. I’m concerned that if we don’t say anything, it looks like we don’t know anything—”

“We
don’t
know anything! It’s okay if it looks like that.”

Jackman ignored the interruption, repeating his earlier statement. “We know Markham was murdered. We believe his wife was a suicide.”

“I don’t know if I believe that at all, Clarence. John here hasn’t even done an autopsy on her yet.” Glitsky reined himself in a notch. Jackman was playing devil’s advocate, he knew, but he would hate it if the DA committed his office to a public stance when it wasn’t necessary. It would be more politics messing with his job. “All I’m saying is that it’s possible somebody could have gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like a suicide. I know Langtry thinks it might be, but we haven’t eliminated any possibilities yet, and I’d be more comfortable—
you’d
be more comfortable, Clarence—if we could eliminate a few before we start talking to the press.”

Jackman frowned. “You’re saying maybe somebody killed her and her family and tried to make it look like a suicide? They find anything at her place that supports that?”

“Not yet, no, sir. But there’s still a lot of lab work to be done.” Glitsky pressed on. “I’ll go with suicide the minute we can prove it, Clarence. I promise you. But for now we’ve got a theory that looks squirrelly to me, which is Markham gets to the hospital all banged up, nearly dead in fact, and somebody decides, spur of the moment, to take the opportunity and kill him?”

Jackman wasn’t backing down. “I honestly believe it will look just precisely like that to some reporter somewhere.”

“Okay, so tell him you’ve got a problem with that. Like why take the risk if he was probably going to die anyway?”

Jackman went back to Strout. “He wasn’t necessarily going to die, was he, John?”

Conjecture wasn’t Strout’s long suit, but the DA had asked him a direct question and he felt he had to say something. “Maybe not. Especially once he’s out of the ER.” He stopped, lifted his shoulders, let them drop. “He could have survived.”

“So,” Jackman took Strout’s answer as a ringing endorsement, “somebody, maybe even his wife—”

“Maybe even the wife!”
This was new and, to Glitsky’s mind, completely bizarre. “You’re saying Carla killed her husband at the hospital?”

Jackman backed off. “All right, maybe not. But somebody at the hospital came to the conclusion that Markham was going to pull through and, for some reason, couldn’t have that.”

“All I’m saying then, Clarence, is let’s find the reason.”

The exchange was threatening to grow heated and Treya stepped in. “Maybe there needn’t be a rush on the wife, Clarence? You only need to make the point that
somebody
killed Mr. Markham. And I think we’ll all agree,” Treya added quickly, turning to her husband, “that the potassium points much more clearly to a murder than an accident at the hospital. Wouldn’t that be true, Abe? Could you agree to that?”

Glitsky understood what she was asking him. More, what she was doing. And while now with the potassium overdose Glitsky believed it likely that Markham had indeed been murdered, belief wasn’t certainty and never would be. “Okay,” he said to his wife. “Let’s for the moment agree Markham was murdered in the hospital. So you tell whoever asks that we’re investigating. That’s what we do. What’s the rush to go public?”