Diagnosis Murder 5 - The Past Tense (11 page)

Joanna started to shake again and held me tight, crying even harder. I stroked her hair, trying to calm her down, rocking her the way I would Steve. What did I say? What had I done?

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"She's dead," Joanna said.

"Who is?"

"Muriel Thayer," she sobbed. "She died, too. In a car accident."

Another dead girl. Another dead babysitter. Another dead aspiring nurse.

I felt my heart start to race and hoped that Joanna, her head against my chest, couldn't feel it, too.

"When did this happen?" I asked, trying to keep my voice even and not betray the excitement I was feeling.

"Last week, when the rains started," Joanna said. "She drove her car off a cliff along Mulholland Highway."

Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make Sally Pruitt's murder look like a storm-related accident. What if Muriel Thayer's death wasn't an accident either?

It meant there was a killer on the loose murdering young women and using the storm to cover his crimes.

Then again, perhaps Muriel Thayer's death really was an accident. The fact that Muriel was a nursing student and a babysitter and died the same week that Sally Pruitt was murdered could simply be a coincidence.

But I knew it wasn't.

I could feel it.

Proving what I felt was another matter altogether, and I had no idea where to begin.

"It hurts so much," Joanna said, lifting her head and looking at me with wide, wet eyes. I wiped a tear from her cheek.

"I know," I said.

"Make it go away," she said huskily, and then she kissed me. It wasn't the gentle, affectionate kiss of a child. There was a hunger, an adult need. She put her whole body into it, reaching a hand behind my neck to draw me to her. I responded instinctively, kissing her back, until I felt the tip of her tongue brushing my lips.

I took her by the shoulders and gently pushed her away. She looked into my eyes, searching them for some thing. "Isn't that what you wanted?"

"No, it isn't," I said.

"But you were l me," she said. "Caressing me."

"I only wanted to comfort you," I said.

"That's all! want to do," she said softly.

"Not in the same way."

Joanna shook her head. "I felt your heart." She placed her hand on my chest. "I still can."

She took my hand and held it between her breasts. "Feel mine."

I could feel it, pounding urgently, her breathing hard.

I took my hand from her. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that my heart wasn't racing over her. But now I wasn't sure. I couldn't deny that I was attracted to her. Any man would be. She was warm and soft and beautiful. But I loved my wife, and the thought of making love to Joanna had never entered my mind.

Until she kissed me.

For an instant, when her body was against mine, when I could feel her warmth and her aching need, the temptation was there. It would have been so easy to give in to it, to lose myself in her. But just as quickly the temptation was gone, replaced by shock and embarrassment.

"I'm sorry if you misunderstood," I said.

"Did I?" she asked.

If I'd offended or embarrassed her with my rejection, she wasn't showing it.

"It's getting late," I said. "I need to get home to my family, to my wife."

I underscored those last three words, hoping they'd make an impression on her.

"Will you walk me to the door?" she asked.

Ordinarily, I would have without thinking twice about it, but not now. Not after her kiss.

"I'll watch you from here," I said.

She gathered up her bag, studied my face for a long moment, then kissed me on the cheek and got out into the rain.

When I got home, Katherine was sitting up in bed in her nightgown, reading
Life
magazine, the same issue Bart had been looking at the other day in the cafeteria. I could still feel the moisture from Joanna's tears on my chest.

During the short drive back, I had debated whether or not to tell Katherine what had happened. I still hadn't decided.

"How would you like to drive a brand-new Chrysler Imperial?" Katherine said.

"Is Dr. Whittington looking for a driver?"

"You can have one of your own," she said. "For free. Chrysler is going to be calling you."

"They will?" I asked. "Why?"

"Because you're a handsome young doctor." She opened the magazine up and held it in front of her for me to see. I sat on the edge of the bed beside her and took a look.

It was a full-page advertisement featuring a square-jawed doctor in a suit, holding his medical bag and admiring a gleaming black 1962 Imperial Crown Four-Door Southampton.

Below the photo, the advertising copy read:

To America's Doctors: We're inviting you to enjoy the personal use of a new Imperial for three days. Soon you will receive a phone call to schedule the delivery of a brand-new car to your door with absolutely no obligation. All we want is for you to make a thorough diagnosis of the Imperial's superior handling, astounding road performance, faultless smoothness, and breathtaking elegance.

"I'll go wait by the phone," I said. "You can take over for me in the morning."

I started to get up but she pulled me back onto the bed, crawled on top of me and pinned me down playfully.

"It's a beautiful car. I think it's going to look great parked outside of our new bomb shelter," Katherine said. "When they call, tell them to deliver it right away. We can drive around Beverly Hills and pretend we're rich."

"Would you like that?"

"I'd love that. It will be fun," she said. "Speaking of calls, did you ask the babysitter for her number?"

"I forgot," I said, which was true. "Sorry."

"Not good enough," Katherine said with a wicked smile.

I suppose I could have told her at that moment about Joanna, but then my wife started to kiss me, and I decided that perhaps it wasn't the best time to talk about necking with another woman.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I managed to beat Dr. Whittington to the hospital, which disappointed me, because I'd never looked better. My socks matched, my tie was tightly knotted, and I wasn't late.

I'd made it to the hospital with time to spare because I woke up long before my alarm rang. I'd slept fitfully, tormented by guilt about what had happened with Joanna Pate.

I didn't kiss her, she kissed me. What bothered me was that I liked it. I felt as if I'd cheated on Katherine. Some how, not telling Katherine about it made it seem even more wrong.

When I wasn't replaying the encounter with Joanna over and over in my mind, I thought about what she'd told me before the kiss and what it might mean.

A week ago, the dark clouds moved over the city, bringing rain and thunder, lightning and death. Two nursing students had died. One of them was murdered.

Was Sally Pruitt actually the second victim? If so, were there others we didn't know about?

As long as the storm lasted, I knew, there would be more mudslides and flooding, more fallen trees and car accidents.

And more murders.

I was still worrying about that as I walked into the ER, which was in chaos. The roof of an apartment building had collapsed in the rain, injuring dozens of people. The victims and their families filled the ER. I set aside my worries and concentrated on treating my patients.

I was just finishing up with the last of my roof-collapse victims several hours later when ambulances started rolling in with people injured in a three-car pileup on Sunset Boulevard that sent one vehicle hurling out of control into a crowded bus stop.

Nurse Alice Blevins quickly assessed the patients as they were wheeled in, deciding who was in the most urgent need of medical attention.

There were so many patients that doctors were called in from elsewhere in the hospital to assist. Dan Marlowe, Bart Spicer, Chet Arnold, and I hurried between exam rooms, treating patients and sending those needing more than emergency care on to specialists in orthopedics, cardiology, and neurology.

It was midafternoon by the time we cleared the emergency room of serious trauma patients and were left with only the typical walk-ins with minor injuries and simple ailments. Once the adrenaline wore off, I realized how hungry and tired I was. I told Alice she could find me in the doctors' lounge if any more emergencies came in.

I was starving, but too weary to go to the cafeteria, so I settled for a cold, soggy sandwich from a vending machine, then stretched out on the hard couch to take a nap.

This time sleep came easily.

I awoke three hours later, stiff and groggy and not the least bit recharged. I actually felt worse than I had before the nap. There was fresh coffee in the pot, so I got up, poured myself a cup, and sat down at one of the tables, waiting for the caffeine to kick in and revive me.

The lounge was our sanctuary, and the doctors were responsible for taking care of it. So, naturally, it was a mess. A week's worth of newspapers were scattered over the tables and chairs. Dirty cups and plates filled the sink.

The garbage can was overflowing. I figured it was my turn to clean up.

I started to gather up the newspapers and was about to throw them out when a tiny news item caught my eye. It was on the back page of the Metro section. The story didn't amount to more than three paragraphs. It was about a car accident on Mulholland Highway, which wasn't really a highway at all but rather a narrow road that wound around the northern edge of the Santa Monica Mountains. According to the article, Muriel Thayer, age nineteen, of Hollywood, died when she lost control of her car on the narrow, winding, rain-slick road.

I felt that tickle, the same mental shiver I'd gotten when I smelled the bath oil on Sally Pruitt's corpse.

I began organizing the newspapers on the couch by day, beginning with the morning the storms rolled in a week ago. Once I had the old newspapers laid out in chronological order, I began going through the news sections column by column, paying particular attention to reports about the storm and people injured by the downpour. I took careful notes as I went along.

When I was done, I had a list of two dozen names. I circled the victims who were alone when they were killed, and then I organized those names by sex and age. Among those half dozen names were two single women in their late teens. One died in a fall down a flight of stairs. Another was electrocuted.

There was nothing in the articles to indicate that either woman's death was anything but an accident. Neither article mentioned whether they were nursing students or not.

I wondered again about Muriel Thayer's death.

Was I jumping to conclusions?

All my fears were based on the similarities between Muriel and Sally and the fact that both of their deaths appeared to be accidents related to the storm.

I hadn't stopped to find out if there actually was anything suspicious about Muriel's accident beyond my own feeling that something wasn't right.

There was one person I could ask—Dr. Jay Barbette, the county medical examiner. But how could I do it with out revealing to him that I was investigating Sally Pruitt's murder?

Then again, it was Dr. Barbette who'd called me a born detective. Would he be any more surprised by what I was doing than Katherine was?

Probably not.

But that didn't mean he would approve of what I was doing. If I called him, he might tell Harry Trumble about it, and then I'd be in big trouble.

It was a risk I had to take, especially if there was a killer out there who'd already struck twice and might murder again.

I gave Dr. Barbette a call from the doctors' lounge, but he wasn't in. His assistant told me he was out at a crime scene. I said I'd call back later and didn't leave a message. I didn't want to take a chance that Harry Trumble would hear that I'd called.

I put my investigation aside and went back to work in the ER.

Alice Blevins assisted me as I put a plaster cast on a man's broken leg. The man had fallen off his roof while trying to plug a leak during a brief lull in the rain.

"Do you do any teaching in the nursing program?" I asked her casually as we worked.

"I'm not on the faculty, if that's what you mean," she said. "But I'm frequently asked to answer questions for the students or tell war stories about my tour of duty in Korea."

"The morale must be pretty low over there," I said.

"Why?" she asked.

"I heard a couple students died in accidents over the last week or so," I said.

"I only know of one. She drove off a cliff or something. Poor girl. I didn't realize there had been others."

I shrugged and told her I didn't know anything more, I was just repeating the scuttlebutt I'd heard around the hospital. What I didn't say was that I was disappointed that she couldn't give me any more details than I already had.

We finished up with the roofer and, as I was coming out of the exam room, I bumped into Bart Spicer. I thanked him again for letting us share a babysitter with him.

"Joanna is terrific, isn't she?" he asked.

I wondered if he knew, or suspected, what had happened between her and me. I wondered if it had happened to him, and if it had, if he'd pushed her away.

"How did you find her?" I asked.

"Word of mouth," Bart said. "Chet or Dan or Phil or one of the other doctors. Are you thinking about using her again?"

"We might," I said. "Have you ever hired any of the other nursing students to babysit? Joanna mentioned something about a list."

"There was one," he said. "I don't know what I did with my copy. Check the bulletin boards around the hospital."

I took his advice and set off down the halls, searching out bulletin boards in the coffee lounges, locker rooms, cafeterias, and anywhere else the hospital staff might congregate.

I couldn't find any copies of the list. And by the time I got to the bulletin board in the pathology lab, I was losing hope.

If I didn't find the list, there were a few other options. I could approach the other doctors and their wives to see if any of them still had a copy.