Fluid Page 7

“She was hiding something in the interview, and her husband and she were having trouble but she couldn’t leave. She has motive.”

  “Well, just because the records say something doesn’t mean it happened exactly that way. I’d go to the hospital and see if you can talk to one of her coworkers who was actually there that night. From the sound of it, fifteen minutes could make all the difference to your timeline.”

  “Twenty maybe, but yeah.” I paused. Here was the part I really wanted another opinion on. “Do I need to take somebody with me? You know, since I can’t testify?” My drug record was legally protected under the Second Chance Act, but any defense attorney in the world would destroy my credibility in ten minutes flat, so the department had been taking steps—like the babysitting cop in the interview room—for years. The question was, did I need one here? Michael was pretty good on the letter of the law and had been in court several times on Cherabino’s cases. That and people liked people who asked them for advice. I’d like Michael to loosen up around me again if possible.

  Michael thought. “Well, to show it in court you’re going to want something. But this one’s better with a witness anyway, I think. If your witness’s credibility is good, it doesn’t really matter who found her. You’re on a timeline?”

  I nodded. “I’m already at the end of my hours for the week, officially, and I’d like to get this done.” Cherabino would probably want my help with her case at some point, and I was already over hours, but I really needed to see this to the end.

  “You might just head on over then. See if something drops.” Michael had been a beat cop for a long time, and he still had that sensibility. But in this case, he was probably right.

  “I hate hospitals,” I muttered.

  “Why?”

  I looked up. “People die in hospitals. Like, a lot of them. And there’s pain and suffering, a lot of it, so that you walk in and you can’t really feel anything else in Mindspace. It’s painful.”

  “Sometimes I forget you’re a telepath,” Michael said.

  “Um, thanks?”

  “Not everything’s easy, huh?”

  “Not really,” I said, and went to stand up.

  “Listen, I’ve got heavy paperwork this week,” Michael said. “You need more advice, I’ll be around.”

  I smiled then, and it wasn’t even fake. “That sounds great.”

  Labor and delivery at Decatur Hospital was a madhouse of pain, excitement, worry, love and fear. The emotions hit me in the face like a punch as soon as I walked over the line of the entrance. At least it wasn’t the ER or anything—I’d walked all the way around the building to enter here, at the specific location, rather than chance a higher-traffic, higher-death area, which would be like a minefield in Mindspace.

  I’d found the floor supervisor, who was irritated but finally let me talk to Ashley Watkins, a twenty-two-year-old nurse who’d been on shift the night in question. She had bleached-blond hair, too much makeup, a solid frame, and scrubs about a size too small. Also, bright green neon athletic shoes.

  “Is there someplace we can talk quickly?” I asked her. “I’m looking into the death of Isaiah Jeffries, and I know his wife Patricia Arnold works here. It won’t take long.”

  Her curious look cleared, and Ashley pulled me aside to a nook with a bunch of machines on carts, all turned off, fortunately. My telepathy didn’t do well with large-scale electromagnetic fields. The rooms around me fairly vibrated with emotions, fear and pain and joy and everything, all mixed up into one, with a rhythm to it, a steady sure rhythm I found all too distracting if I let it in. So, as a result, with all the attention I had in keeping my mental shields up, I had very little to judge her truthfulness other than the evidence of my own eyes and ears.

  “We only have a few minutes before I need to check Mrs. Manuel in 1247,” she said. “What do you need to know?”

  “You were on duty the night of murder, correct?” I said.

  “That’s right. I don’t usually work Sundays, but they changed the schedule last week at the last minute, and I got moved from Wednesday to Sunday night. I was upset because I had a date I had to cancel pretty late.”

  “Okay,” I said, and made a mental note to come back to that. “Tell me about Patricia. Do you know her well?”

  “Well, she’s not here right now if that’s what you’re asking. She seems okay. She’s good with the patients, and she doesn’t shirk her part. She doesn’t let people get very close. So I don’t know her very well. I don’t think anybody here does.”

  “Is that unusual?” I asked her.

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “When you work this many hours with people, you get to be friends with most of them. At least that’s what the others say. I’ve been here six months, and I know most everybody.” She explained, “I got out of nursing school six months ago.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So Patricia was here on Sunday night? Did you see her?”

  “Yep, I saw her. Mrs. White went into labor that night, and she was on call, so she got called in. We had a full patient set already, you see.”

  “What time did you see her?” I asked.

  “Maybe ten minutes before midnight? Yeah, that’s about right. Mrs. White had been in active labor awhile by then, and I was having to juggle her and my other patients. I ran into her at maybe ten till at the shift station. She was updating the time logs. I fussed at her for being late—I’d called her in a little after eleven, and she’d known Mrs. White was probably going to pop that night. I mean, we all did. She’d come in that morning effaced at almost seventy percent, and she was already almost two weeks overdue.”

  I held up a hand to prevent her from describing medical things I really, really didn’t want to know about. Then I actually thought about what she had said. “So Patricia was later than you thought she should be.”

  “Yes. Maybe a half hour. She doesn’t live far from here, and like I said, it’s not like she didn’t know this one was coming.”

  “She was on call that night,” I said. “And she’d had warning that she’d probably have to come in that night.” I was starting to see that her famous last-minute alibi wasn’t so puncture-proof after all.

  “That’s right,” Ashley said.

  “Did anybody see Patricia before you did?”

  “I don’t know of anybody. And anyway, she usually updates the logs right when she comes in so that’s probably what happened that night anyway. We’re all supposed to, but some of us do it at end of shift. She’s a stickler for the beginning, though, since she keeps the schedule.”

  A big red flag went off in my head. “Let’s back up,” I said. “Patricia keeps the schedule?”

  Ashley nodded and glanced at her watch.

  “And your schedule got changed at the last minute to put you on duty on Sunday? Did Patricia’s schedule get changed too?”

  She looked over at the room at the end of the hall, seemingly itching to go already. “Oh, sure. She was supposed to be on call next week, not this week. But she said she had this big thing, and she keeps the schedule, so we all switched. Two of the other nurses were super mad at her, but she said she’d take their on-call for a couple days next time it came up, and they said okay.”

  So Patricia’s alibi didn’t actually cover her between eleven and eleven-thirty that night; in fact, she’d been later to work than she should have been, maybe twenty minutes, maybe the amount of time it took to clean herself up after a murder. But her time log said she’d clocked in at eleven twenty-five. A time log she controlled, for a night she’d assigned herself, knowing full well she’d likely be called in.

  The angry wife’s alibi going up in smoke, like a match to a bonfire.

  “Would you be willing to testify to this in court if it helps to catch Jeffries’s killer?” I asked.

  Now her attention came back to me fully, with suspicion. “Why, are you suspecting Patricia?”

  “No, nothing like that,” I lied, and then smiled. “Just being very thorough at
this point.” I couldn’t have her talking to the wife until the uniforms had a chance to bring her in.

  She sighed, looked back at the clock. “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s all I had. You can go check on your patient now.”

  She was down the hall before I even finished my sentence.

  I found the ME in the basement of the city’s tax building, where the morgue had been moved after flooding once too often in its previous location. The building made me think of Cherabino, with some pain. She’d been the first one to bring me here. She’d been the one to get me hooked on solving murders. And now she was serving papers for the PI agency I wasn’t even at this week.

  I pushed it aside in time to say hello to the medical examiner, a lovely woman with a Jamaican lilt who’d always been kind to me, despite the rumors of the horrors of telepaths. As a medical examiner, she was thorough and well-trained, and according to Cherabino, her testimony always played well with a jury.

  I felt a little awkward; normally I brought some kind of cookies or something to meetings like this, but this time I’d forgotten. This was also the first time I’d been down here by myself, and it bothered me. The long rows of metal storage for corpses gave off a low-level shriek in Mindspace, their quantum stasis fields playing badly with Mindspace waves, but what bothered me more was the two bodies, a man and a woman, lying completely naked on the metal tables at the center of the room. Each had significant damage, damage that had killed them, and looking at them out in the open like this, without any dignity at all, bothered me a lot.

  “What can I help you with?” the ME asked me, amused at something. Probably me.

  “Um, I’m here about the Isaiah Jeffries case.”

  She frowned for a minute, thinking, then said, “I’m sorry, Adam, but the body has already been released to the funeral home.”

  “I figured it would be. Um, I just had a couple of questions. I assume you’ll need to look at notes?”

  She stood up from her small stool and walked over to a tall metal filing cabinet, pulling out the second drawer and paging through until she found the right file. She closed it and came back over to the small desk near me, gesturing for me to take a seat in the extra chair.

  I said, “Jeffries was drowned? Intentionally?”

  She glanced over the notes she made. “There wasn’t enough water in the lungs to indicate drowning. I included the details in the report. Cause of death was arrhythmia. Possibly related to electrical influence. The bruises aren’t indicative of either intentional or unintentional action. He was submerged at the time, but I don’t think drowning is indicated.”

  Oh, that’s right. “You’re ruling it an accident, with the electrocution. Like Branen wants you to.”

  “My findings are based on the evidence, not on whatever a lieutenant wants, I assure you. The victim had a high blood alcohol level. These things happen.” She sat and thought; I could see the thoughts darting around her head like fish in a pond. “If it was a straightforward accident, he would have knocked the cooler device into the water with a hand or an arm. I’d expect to see burn marks from where the electricity entered the body. His skin would be wet. You’d see that closed loop first.” She looked at me. “At least that’s the typical presentation. We don’t see that here, and you could argue that the device fell into the water some other way. Accident is still the best read of the evidence, either way.”

  I took a breath. Two. I’d been working this, I realized, completely on the feelings I’d gotten from the Mindspace crime scene. I had to connect the last few dots or my certainty wouldn’t mean anything and maybe Branen would want to consider the whole thing an accident.

  “There were bruise marks on the neck,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Like someone had tried to strangle him.”

  “But the hyoid bone wasn’t broken, the windpipe was whole if shut. It wasn’t a successful manual strangulation, and with the influence of the heated water, there’s no guarantee the wounds were perimortem.”

  I paused for a moment. “How big were the hands that strangled him? The hand, if there was just one? Can you tell from the bruise marks? Would it have been the right size for a smallish woman? She’s a nurse, so she’s not weak, but she’s not big either.”

  “I take it you have a suspect?”

  I nodded.

  She pulled out a piece of paper, what looked like tracing paper with pencil marks on it. “These are the bruises,” she said. “Eight inches on a side at most, even given the curve.” She folded the paper carefully, to the curve of a throat, place her own very small hand above it. The marks were too far apart to be made by her fingers.

  She offered me the paper and I did the same. My hands, rough in places still from my time on the streets, were broad, with long fingers. Even along the curve, I couldn’t make them comfortably fit into the marks either. If my thumb lined up, my pointer or index finger was out of alignment. Whoever had done this had mid-sized hands, with shorter fingers closer together. I tried to remember what kind of hands Ms. Arnold had and drew a complete blank.

  “Were the bruises deep?” I asked, for something to ask. I handed the paper back, and she put it back in the folder.

  “No, and they’re more diffuse than you might expect. Like whoever held his throat couldn’t keep a grip or push very hard.”

  That would line up with my vision but didn’t prove anything. “What about angle?” I asked. “Was the person short? Can you tell exactly when the bruising happened?”

  “No way of telling. He or she was standing next to the victim, above him, as near as I can tell, reaching down. As I said, it could easily have been earlier in the day, though.”

  “There we go,” I said. Washington was out, then; he would have been about Jeffries’s height, and I couldn’t see the reporter letting a hostile cop stand above him and to the side. It occurred to me to ask, “How realistic do you think it is to classify this one as a murder?”

  The ME shrugged. “I ruled it an accident for a reason. If you’re determined, I can see the case for intentional death. Honestly, I collect the facts, other people argue them. If I was a betting woman though . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d try to account for that bruising. Without a good explanation for it—and given its nonlethality—you don’t have a case.”

  “Would a smallish woman be able to cause the bruising you saw?”

  “I couldn’t rule her out.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. I stood up and thanked her. “I have a lot to think about.”

  The ME smiled. “Glad I could be helpful.” Then she turned back to her work, and I, back to mine.

  It felt odd to be doing this part alone. Very, very odd indeed.

  But I also had to finish this. I had to.

  It could be the wife’s hands, right? It could. I told myself that I believed Washington when he’d said he hadn’t laid hands on the man. I did. Mostly.

  When I arrived back at the station, it was an hour before quitting time, but I went over to the dispatch desk to see what it would take to get the wife brought back in for questioning tomorrow. I had an hour, maybe two at most, before I’d definitely be done with my part-time hours for the week. Maybe I could get away with working overtime.

  When I asked the dispatch officer about procedure, though, she laughed and said Patricia Arnold was already in the interview rooms, as it happened. She’d walked in a few hours ago at the door closest to Dispatch and asked the officer to speak with whoever was handling her case.

  “Really?” I asked, unbelievingly.

  “Really,” the officer said, and laughed as she took the next call on her headset.

  I shook my head and got on the ancient elevator again, its buttons so worn from years of use you couldn’t read the numbers anymore, and waited for it to make its way down to the second basement.

  The doors finally opened with a ding, and sure enough, Interview Room 3 ha
d its light on, clearly full. The trouble was, I knew better than to interrupt an interview mid-session, even if I was kinda pissed that nobody had invited me to it. I knocked on the door to the recording room next door, feeling two minds behind it, one of them Freeman’s.

  The recording room’s door opened, and Freeman said. “Come in, but stay quiet,” he said. His mind added that he’d like to know where I’d been once this was all over.

  I moved into the recording booth and looked through the one-way glass that appeared as a mirror in the interview room. It was only two feet wide, but that was enough to see Patricia Arnold, and the sound system clearly projected both her words and Branen’s, the back of whose head I could see through the glass.

  Wait, Freeman was here with me in the booth. Why was Branen in there and not Freeman? This had to be big.

  I started paying attention.

  “. . . my husband’s notes are very thorough,” Patricia Arnold said with the even tone of someone who’d said this all at least twice before. “They point to several officers caught in wrongdoing that was known and approved by the higher-ups in your department. None of this is published yet, and the Journal editor isn’t expecting it. I know because I’ve been working with him since the beginning, and believe me, his sources are significant and go far beyond what I’ve learned through your department.”

  Branen’s body language didn’t change. “We have reasonable suspicion of a major crime, and we’ve searched your apartment once already. Do you really expect me to believe we haven’t found all of it by now?”

  Patricia didn’t flinch. “My husband was a paranoid alcoholic studying corruption in the police force. Do you really think he didn’t have backup copies away from the apartment?” She put her hands flat on the table. “I’m not here to threaten you or cause trouble. In fact, I’m here for exactly the opposite reason.”

  That made me curious—and I reached out past Branen to try to connect with her mind. Telepathy got a lot less strong the farther you were away from someone, but she was still in my range, even if weaker as a result. I heard her words now slightly before she said them.