Dead Certain (32 page)

“The police are going to want to talk to you,” I said to Claudia’s father as the door closed behind Agent Roth. I knew that I was just stalling, making conversation so that I could put off doing what had to be done. “I’ll take you to the station as soon as we’re finished here.”

“Why do they want to see me?” he asked.

“I think it’s routine for them to talk to the family. He’ll probably also want to ask you some questions about the last time you saw Claudia, the last time you two spoke.“

“We talked last night,” he said, his eyes resting on the telephone on the table in the entrance hall. “She called me when she came home after her shift. I was surprised to hear from her. She usually only calls on Sundays when the rates are low.”

“Why do you think she called you last night?” I asked, wanting to know what time it had been and wondering if it might help Blades pin down the time of death. “Do you remember when she phoned?”

“A little after nine. She said she was in some kind of trouble. She wanted to know what I thought she should do.”

“You mean about the malpractice suit?”

“Yes. She was very worried about it. Even though she knew that she hadn’t done anything wrong when she took out that woman’s appendix, she was terribly upset. She was afraid that the whole thing was going to end up ruining her career.”

“Did she tell you that she’d hired a lawyer?” I asked. “Did she explain that she was going to fight the suit? „

“Yes. But apparently the hospital people were very angry about that. They were trying to pressure her into agreeing to some kind of settlement.”

“What kind of settlement?”

“She didn’t say, but I think the hospital just wanted to do whatever they could to make the whole thing go away.”

“Did she say who it was who was trying to pressure her?”

“No. But they said that if she didn’t agree to the settlement, they’d make the charges against her public. You know she had a job lined up at Columbia’s medical school in the fall. She wanted to come back to New York so that she could be closer to us. It’s what she’d worked her whole life for. She was worried that the people at Prescott Memorial were out to destroy her.”

I took Professor Stein into the butler’s pantry just to get it over with. The blood was all still there, though now it mostly looked just dark and brown. He spent a long time standing there, staring at it. It was the last place that I wanted to be, but I didn’t feel as though I could just leave him there. The trouble is that there are some things that you can never unsee. I couldn’t erase the image of Claudia’s body. It was as though it had been burned into my retina. Even if I went blind and lived for a thousand years, there was no way I was ever going to forget it.

And yet the longer I looked, the more I saw what Joe Blades had seen. It was actually a very simple picture— the dark lake of blood, smooth edged and now drying, and the chalk outline of her body on the dirty floor where she had died. Most of the glass-fronted cabinets in the pantry were empty. Detective Kowalczyk had been right. The knife block, the handful of champagne glasses, the few plates and cups and glasses that Claudia and I had between us were all anomalies in an otherwise empty kitchen.

Professor Stein even gave voice to it. With tears leaking from behind the steel frames of his glasses, he turned away from the chalk outline on the floor. “At least she didn’t struggle,” he said quietly. Then he started down the hallway to his daughter’s room.

She didn’t struggle.

I remembered the whiteness of her body and the coldness of her skin. There were no bruises, no cuts, no defensive wounds. Wouldn’t she have reached for the knife or even—I hated to think about it—writhed in pain as she bled to death on the floor? Anything that would have disturbed the neat puddle of the blood on the linoleum floor.

Even though Claudia had been tiny, certainly she would have done something to defend herself. Or had she just been paralyzed by fear? I really didn’t know about such things, but it almost looked as if Claudia had lain still and allowed herself to be slaughtered.

Lain still.

I reached for the phone on the wall in the kitchen. Then I dialed Julia Gordon’s number at the medical examiner’s office.

CHAPTER 24

“Oh, my god, Kate!” exclaimed Dr. Gordon as soon as I got her on the phone. “I can’t believe it about Claudia. Someone told me about a stabbing when I stopped at Starbucks this morning, but I had no idea that it was Claudia until I got in this morning and saw her name on the day’s case log.”

“Will you be performing the autopsy?” I asked, trying to push down the thought of Dr. Gordon practicing her grisly avocation on my roommate.

“No, Dr. Sylvestri will be doing her case. As a rule we don’t do autopsies on people we know. Of course, Detective Blades was here first thing this morning pushing to have it done right away.”

“Have they started?”

“They’re downstairs right now. Believe me, Kate, nobody wants to see this one slip through the cracks. Detective Blades says that he’s already gotten calls from the University of Chicago—you know how sensitive they are when anything happens in Hyde Park—and the people at Northwestern Medical School because she was one of their fellows, all putting on the pressure.”

“Would you be willing to do me a favor?” I asked. “That would depend on what it is.”

“Do you remember what we talked about the other day in your office? Those cases where caregivers were going around deliberately murdering patients?”

“Yes,” she replied, a note of caution entering her voice. “Do you think that they could have something to do with Claudia’s death?”

“Please, Julia,” I said, “just ask them to test for any kind of drug that can cause paralysis.”

“When are you going to tell me what all of this is about?” she demanded.

“Just ask them to do the tests. If any of them come back positive, I promise, I’ll tell you everything.”

After I hung up the phone, I went looking for Claudia’s father. I found him in her room. He was sitting on the end of her bed. Beside him was the outfit that he’d chosen for her to be buried in, a red wool dress with a black velvet collar that I’d helped her pick out for her interview at Columbia. In his hands were some snapshots of Claudia that Carlos had taken when she and the paramedic had gone to Galena for the weekend. In them Claudia had looked happy.

I watched from the doorway for a long time, but Claudia’s father never looked up, and I couldn’t bring myself to disturb him. Instead I went back into my bedroom and packed up some of my own things that I’d be needing over the next few days.

I took my suitcase and the clothes that I needed that were still on hangers from the dry cleaner and put them in the front hall by the door. Agent Roth still hadn’t returned, so I took some time to say my own good-byes. Not to Claudia—the time for that would come later— but to the place where we’d lived for so many years. I walked slowly from room to room, remembering. There was really nothing I wanted to take with me. The stereo belonged to Claudia. I’d send it and her CDs to her parents when I packed up the rest of her things. Everything else I would just get rid of.

I walked into the dining room and wondered if anyone would ever want our beat-up table. Maybe I should just leave it for the next tenants—let the tradition continue. I wondered whether Milos, our landlord, would tell whoever rented it about what had happened here. He probably wouldn’t have to. The neighbors would be dying to tell them the news.

I sat down at the head of the table in the chair where Claudia had been sitting the last time she and I were together. She’d been poring through the charts of all of the Prescott Memorial patients who had died, looking for a way to save her career, not knowing that it was her life that she was going to end up losing. She’d been looking through the records hoping to find some variable, some thread that linked them together. She had been meticulously listing their attributes on a hand-drawn chart in the hopes of finding a clue to how they’d died. But when I looked at the dining room table, I saw that it was empty. The chart had been there when I’d picked up the box of files yesterday morning to be copied. I remembered seeing it there.

With a growing sense of urgency I began systematically looking through the apartment. I checked on the desk by the telephone in the front hall, thinking perhaps that she’d had it in her hand when she’d called her father. I checked the trash cans to see if by any chance she’d thrown it away. There was nothing.

Reluctantly I made my way back to my roommate’s bedroom. I didn’t want to disturb her father, but I was convinced that her notes would be there, if anywhere. Besides, I had to know. Something more than instinct, a kind of primal humming in my chest, told me that it was important.

I found Professor Stein neatly folding up Claudia’s clothes and putting them into his black duffel. “I think I am ready to go to the police,” he said.

“While you were looking through Claudia’s things, did you happen to come across some notes that she had written on a yellow sheet of legal paper?” I asked.

“No. I haven’t seen anything like that.”

“Do you mind if I look around her room? It was something she was working on that related to the malpractice case. I’m just wondering what’s happened to it.”

Morton Stein shrugged his shoulders and went back to his grim packing. Claudia’s room was so tidy it took only a minute to look through it. There was nothing there that pertained in any way to the patients at Prescott Memorial. Suddenly I thought of something.

“Have you seen her backpack?” I asked.

“Her what?”

“Her purple backpack. She carried it instead of a purse. It was the kind I’m sure all your students carry. There was nothing special about hers except that she had a key chain of a skeleton hanging from the zipper.”

“I didn’t come across it,” he said, closing up the bag and hoisting it onto his shoulder, ready to go.

Suddenly I was glad that we were on our way to see Joe Blades. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, when he’d asked me if there was anything missing from the apartment, I hadn’t given him the correct answer.

I brought Claudia’s father to the sixth district police station. It was a battle-scarred edifice that looked like a cross between an office building and a bunker. Inside, the desk sergeant dealt with the public through two inches of bulletproof glass, and the cramped waiting room was furnished with wooden benches chained to the wall. The whole place smelled like the Prescott Memorial emergency room, only without the benefit of disinfectant.

I hated to leave Claudia’s father there, but he said he didn’t want to inconvenience me any further. Besides, he pointed out that the police would almost surely want to talk to him alone. I left him reluctantly, pressing my office number upon him along with instructions to call me when he was ready to be picked up. From my car phone I dialed Joe Blades, only to be told, just as I’d expected, that he was on his way back from the medical examiner’s office. I left a message that I’d called. Then I dialed Joan Bornstein’s office.

Fortunately she was in. After I told her that Claudia had been murdered, I waited while she cycled through the normal shocks of incredulity and dismay. But when she started in on the dangers of Hyde Park, I cut her off.

“I don’t think she surprised a burglar,” I informed her. “I think this is all tied into what is going on at Prescott Memorial.”

“You mean the malpractice suit?”

“That or her old boyfriend or the bid by HCC. I’m not sure which, but her death advances too many people’s agendas for it to be a coincidence.”

“What do the police think?” I could tell from her tone of voice that she thought I was crazy.

“They’re doing their job, which is to find physical evidence, interview witnesses, and chase down leads. In the meantime, there’s something that I need you to do.“

“Anything.”

“I’m going to have copies of the patient files that Claudia was reviewing, the patients whose deaths were suspicious, brought over to your office. I want you to get a couple of doctors working on going through them right away.”

“What do you mean by right away?” she demanded.

“Immediately. Right now.”

“Today? Do you have any idea what I’d have to pay to get a physician to just drop what he’s doing and tackle this?”

“I don’t care. I’m willing to pay the earth.”

“That’s good,” replied Joan Bornstein, “because that’s pretty much what it’s going to end up costing you.”

When I arrived at the firm, I bumped into Jeff Tannenbaum in the reception room. He’d just come from a meeting with the Icon lawyers. The documents had been approved by both sides, and they would be ready for signatures in a couple of hours. According to Jeff, Gabriel Hurt was not only flying back for the closing but insisted that it take place at Prescott Memorial in Bill Delius’s hospital room.

Back at my own office Cheryl seemed surprised to see me. Surprised as well as uncertain. I could see the flicker of wariness behind her eyes, the distance that my grief now put between us. I could also tell she hadn’t made up her mind about how to handle this, to handle me.