Lowcountry Bombshell (A Liz Talbot Mystery) (20 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

I hate hospitals. I’m afraid to breathe in them. People catch things in hospitals, sometimes worse things than what they came in with. I tried not to touch anything in the ER waiting room at East Cooper Medical. After what seemed like days, a nurse came out and told me Calista and Elenore were being admitted for observation. She gave me a room number for Calista and told me I could wait there—she’d be brought up shortly. I punched the elevator button with my elbow and held my breath for the ride.

I found the room and perched on the edge of a chair. Eventually, two nurse’s aides rolled Calista in and moved her to the bed. She was so still.

“When can I speak to a doctor?” I asked, wondering when someone was going to ask me who exactly I was. I’d known going in that sooner or later I’d have to lie and say I was family. I had zero time to discuss HIPPA regulations.

One of the aides smiled. “Someone will be in shortly.”

Shortly turned out to be forty-five minutes. An Asian woman, whose nametag read Dr. Sharma, came into the room. “Hello, you are with Ms. McQueen?”

“Yes. I found her, unresponsive, at home. Is she going to be all right?”

“Are you a member of her family?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m her sister.”

“I see. Yes, Ms. McQueen should make a full recovery.”

“Do you know what she ingested?”

“Yes. It was flunitrazepam. Rohypnol. You may have heard it referred to as the date-rape drug. It’s unusual for us to get patients quickly enough to verify it was Rohypnol. It’s only detectable in the blood for four hours. Longer in urine. But, most often in the patients we see, it’s out of their systems.”

“And Mrs. Harper…she had the same thing in her system? She’s Calista’s housekeeper. We’re all the family she has.” I gave her a look that added,
the poor thing
.

The doctor hesitated. “Yes, Mrs. Harper had the same drug in her system, though her symptoms were not as pronounced. It can affect people differently. Also, your sister had alcohol in her system. That dramatically increases Rohypnol’s adverse effects.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

“You are very welcome. We’ll just keep them both until they’re fully alert and make sure there are no complications. The nurses will check on them periodically. If you need anything, press the button.” She smiled and left the room.

I pulled out my iPhone and opened the app that monitored Calista’s phone. She’d been fully alert when she spoke with the therapist. That had been at ten fifteen. When Niles texted her at ten forty-five, she never replied.

She’d told the therapist she was going to have tea. Had Elenore made tea for both of them? Had she spiked it, then drank a little herself to avoid suspicion? Possibly, but I didn’t peg her as having shot Jim Davis. I had a bad feeling he was dead because of who he’d seen coming or going.

Calista stirred. “Liz?”

I jumped out of the chair and to the bedside. “Hey. How are you feeling?”

“Like I have a bad hangover. I only had one glass of wine.”

“I thought you didn’t drink.”

“I told you I don’t drink hard liquor. I do have wine occasionally, though not much of it. What happened? Where am I?”

“You’re at East Cooper Medical Center. We had a hard time waking you up.”

“I don’t understand. Isn’t it nighttime?”

I looked at my watch. “It’s almost two-thirty in the morning.”

“So why were you trying to wake me up to begin with?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Ummph….” Calista screwed up her face. “I had a glass of wine to relax me. But I still felt wired. Mrs. Harper made us a pot of tea. We drank it together in the living room.”

“Was anyone else there?”

“No. Just Mrs. Harper and me.”

“Do you remember setting the alarm and going to bed?”

“No.”

I’d tell her about Jim later. “Nate and I were driving by on our way home. We heard your alarm.” I told her about waking Elenore to let us in. “I think Elenore must have had less tea than you did.”

“No, we each had two cups.”

“Did she have wine?”

“No. Mrs. Harper doesn’t drink alcohol.”

“Okay. Just rest. I’ll be right here.”

“Did someone poison our tea?”

“It looks that way.”

“Is Mrs. Harper all right?”

“She’ll be fine. Rest now.”

Calista drifted back to sleep.

Did the wine account for Calista being that much more drugged than Elenore? Had someone else been there?

I needed to know Jim Davis’s time of death. I couldn’t think of a solitary reason why Elenore would go across the street and kill him. Unless maybe it was to keep him from mentioning that no one had come or gone. But how would she have known he was there to begin with?

And would she have been able to do such a thing after ingesting the Rohypnol? From what I knew about the drug, and the timeline of when Calista stopped responding to phone activity after she’d said they were going to have tea, it was fast-acting.

Who set off the alarm? Was it accidental? If not, why would anyone do that? Who turned the system on to begin with? So many questions swirled in my head. But one thing was clear. Elenore had made the tea. How could anyone else have poisoned it without her knowing? It would appear either she did it for her own reasons or at someone’s instruction. Considering the professional scale of the other crimes committed, I was betting on the latter.   

I needed to have a serious talk with Mack Ryan. I still didn’t completely trust him. But I trusted him more than I trusted the rest of his team. If he was clean, he’d be just as interested in getting to the bottom of this as I was.

Bright sunlight spilled into the room when I jerked awake. I sat up straight and snatched my arms from the armrests. I pulled out my sanitizer and rubbed a thick layer on my hands and arms.

“You’ll probably die from alcohol poisoning,” Calista said. She was propped up on pillows and grinning at me.

“You’re awake.”

“Yes, but still a bit muddy-brained.”

“How long have you been watching me sleep?”

“Just a few minutes.”

“I just dozed off.”

“You need to go home and get some rest.”

“No, I need to stick with you. And we need to haul Mack Ryan in here and find out how his high-dollar system failed so miserably last night. Again.”

“But you said the alarm went off.”

“The audible alarm went off. But no one from the monitoring center responded. Something didn’t work right, or Blake would’ve gotten a call, and one of SSI’s teams would have been dispatched.”

“Oh.” Her eyes widened. “What were Mrs. Harper and I poisoned with?”

“Rohypnol.”

“But neither of us were harmed. Why would someone knock us out just so we’d go to sleep?”

“That’s one of several very good questions I don’t have the answer to—yet. Have you remembered anything else?”

“No.” She squared her shoulders. “Have you spoken to Jimmy, Grace, and my mother?”

My heart hurt. “Calista, there’s something I haven’t told you.”

“What is it?” She bit her bottom lip.

“There’s no easy way to say this. Jim Davis is dead. Nate and I found him in his car, parked across the street from your house just before the alarm went off.”

She raised both hands to her face. “Jimmy? Why would anyone hurt Jimmy?”

“I suspect because he saw someone entering or leaving your house and could have identified him.”

“Or maybe Grace killed him for spite after what happened yesterday at lunch.”

“Do you suspect Grace knows how to handle a gun?”

“He was shot?”

Nate’s voice came from the door of the room. “Actually, it looks like Jim committed suicide.”

“What?” I said. “Do you have a time of death?”

“Preliminary estimate is between nine and eleven p.m.”

I processed that. It didn’t clear anyone.

“I don’t believe it,” said Calista.

Nate grimaced. “He left a note. It appears to be his handwriting. The gun was registered to him. The coroner won’t make a final ruling until an autopsy is done, but his preliminary finding is that it’s a suicide.”

“What did the note say?” Calista asked.

Nate’s eyes were compassionate, his voice gentle. “That he couldn’t live without you anymore.”

I said, “That doesn’t make a lick of sense. He’s lived without her for eighteen years.”

Nate shrugged. “He was emotional yesterday.”

“But not depressed,” I said.

“I don’t care what any report says. I’ll never believe Jimmy killed himself,” Calista said adamantly. “It just wasn’t his nature. Whoever is trying to kill me killed him because he wanted to protect me.”

“I think that’s closer to the truth,” I said.

“Let’s see what the coroner’s final report says,” Nate said. “For right now, why don’t you get some rest and let me stay with Calista a while.”

Calista said, “Both of you should get some rest. No one is going to bother me here.”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe that for a minute. We’re not leaving you alone again.”

“Then you’re going to need reinforcements. You have to sleep. You can’t guard me twenty-four-seven.”

I said, “The problem with that is the only private security company in the area with the type of personnel we need is SSI, and we can’t trust them.”

Nate said, “That’s not exactly true. We don’t trust two of them.”

I nodded. “Let’s get Mack Ryan in here.”

Mack Ryan came quickly when Calista called, I’ll give him that. Twenty minutes after she told him what had happened and where she was, he was standing in the room. He looked exactly the same as he had the day I’d met with him, right down to the black SSI logo shirt.

Calista sat quietly as Nate and I filled Mack in. When we finished, he turned to Calista. “Ms. McQueen, I’m deeply sorry. I’m sure you know this is not typical of our operation. If it were, we wouldn’t stay in business long. We will provide around-the-clock personal security until this threat has been neutralized.”

“I’d like that coordinated with Ms. Talbot,” Calista said.

“Yes, ma’am.” Mack nodded at her, then me.

“Neither Ryder Keenan nor Tim Poteat are coming anywhere near her,” I said.

“They’ll both be placed on administrative leave until we complete our investigation,” said Mack.

“Are there any other former Charleston PD officers on your staff?” I asked.

Mack nodded. “One currently. And one that left our team a few months ago.”

I said, “I’ll need those names.”

“Anything else?” Mack asked.

“Actually, I’d like a complete roster of all your current and prior employees. And I’d like to know Keenan and Poteat’s movements last night,” I said. “They were both on duty, and both inside your offices at eight-forty-five.”

Mack nodded. “The motion detectors in Ms. McQueen’s home did not activate the cameras. Our office did not receive an alert when the audible alarm sounded. However, we did receive a code yellow, indicating a malfunction with the equipment earlier in the evening. Keenan was dispatched to check it out at twenty-one hundred.”

“He went alone?” I asked.

“Affirmative. He has a law enforcement background, but he’s also technically skilled. It was efficient for him to go alone. We were aware of no threat. This left one response team and a watch supervisor available for other calls.”

“Were there other calls?” I asked.

Mack wrinkled his forehead. “Affirmative. We had a call out on Kiawah Island. Motion detectors activated and a prowler was observed on camera. Team two was dispatched.”

“Was Tim Poteat on team two?” Nate asked.

“No. He is Keenan’s partner. He stayed at headquarters last night to serve as watch supervisor in case we needed to call in another team.”

“Was anyone else called in?” I asked.

“No.”

“So last night, Ryder Keenan went alone to Calista’s home, and Tim Poteat never left the office?”

“That’s correct,” said Mack.

“What did Keenan report?”

“He checked the control panel, which is hidden and secured outside the residence so we can access it without disturbing our clients. He replaced a bad switch. He reported the perimeter secure at twenty-two thirty and came back to headquarters afterward. We were not aware anything was wrong until I received Ms. McQueen’s call.”

“Tell me about Ryder Keenan,” I said.

“He’s a family man. A straight arrow. I stand behind him one hundred percent. That said, we must follow protocol. I will make him available for questioning.”

“And Tim Poteat?” I asked.

“Since Poteat didn’t leave the office last night, my opinion, that clears him,” said Mack. “If the local PD wants to question him as well, I’ll see that he complies.”

“And you’re positive he couldn’t have left without you knowing it?” Nate asked.

Mack grimaced. “I’m positive of very little. But technicians in the monitoring room spoke to him several times. It’s highly unlikely he could have left undetected.”

“How about this. I’d like headshots of your entire staff, plus the guy who left recently,” I said.

“To what purpose?”

“To see if Calista recognizes any of them,” I said.

Mack said, “But several of them have been to her home at various times. She is going to recognize them. What does that prove?”

“I want to know if she recognizes any of them from somewhere else.” Between the first shift employees, the ones who would have been off the night before, and anyone on vacation, there were quite a few SSI employees we hadn’t vetted. Not to mention the guy who recently left. Keenan might be our guy. He also might be the victim of a frame. I wasn’t ready to pronounce Poteat or anyone else cleared at that point. A conspiracy among several of them was possible.

Calista said, “Mack, please give her whatever she needs.”

Mack nodded once. “Very well.”