Dying for Compassion (The Lady Doc Murders Book 2) Read online

  “Jane, a nurse from Proserpine just killed a patient down at the clinic. You need to do something.” He dropped his wet gloves on my desk. They plopped onto a stack of correspondence I had just signed. The melting snow dripped water onto the top letter and smeared my signature, written in fountain ink.

  “Father!” I brushed the gloves aside and rescued the other letters. “Slow down. What’s happened? And who is Proserpine?”

  “Sorry.” Father Matt tossed his coat over the back of the green leather couch. “I was called down to the clinic. A little girl died there this morning, Josie…Josie…” He paused. “I don’t know her last name.”

  “I do. Josie Beck. She was a client.” I breached two flavors of professional confidentiality without a second thought. So we’d lost the race to get Josie her care. The insurance company won. For once, at news of a death close to me, I didn’t feel like the earth had fallen away. I was just so very sad. “Tell me what happened.” We sat down in the sitting area, he on the couch, I in my favorite overstuffed chair. I had to move some books aside first.

  “She got sick with some kind of stomach virus. Her father brought her into the clinic. They were treating her, IVs and all, and getting ready to transfer her to Grand Junction. The receptionist said that that kind of thing could be bad for her.”

  I considered all of this for a moment. “I suppose. I don’t know enough about the details of her particular disease, to be sure. But her health was pretty fragile, so I suppose that anything might have tipped her over the edge.”

  “Would this?” Matt rummaged around in his pocket and handed me a plastic bag. In it was a small vial. “I found it in the sheets where Josie was lying.”

  Potassium chloride. I turned it over in my hands for a moment as I ran the probabilities. “It could. Certainly a bolus of this is enough to kill anyone, and it is untraceable at that. But if she had been very sick and her electrolytes were off balance, the clinic staff could have added this to the IV just to bring her numbers back in order.” I set it carefully on the table beside me. “Matt, that was one sick little girl. This isn’t much to go on.”

  “How about the fact that the nurse taking care of her is a member of Proserpine?”

  “Proserpine?”

  “It’s that…that…group that advocates assisted suicide. Calls it ‘compassionate death.’” Father Matt almost spat out the words.

  I couldn’t blame him. I had no use for the groups pushing assisted suicide, especially since a few states, including Colorado, had legalized it. It bothered me enough on its own; now I was finding that insurance companies were reluctant to cover expensive terminal care, like Josie’s, but were more than happy to cover the cost of drugs to end a life. At its best, it was medical ethics gone mad. Personally, I considered it the worst kind of victimization of the most vulnerable, and crass profiteering at its worst. “And you know this, how? Are you spying, Father Matt?”

  “No. Well, yes, but that’s not how I know. She was wearing a pomegranate pin on her scrubs. That’s their logo.”

  I considered the situation. Josie was terminally ill; we all knew that. She was at the center of a fight to get her insurance company to pay for new, cutting-edge care that promised to extend her life, at least a bit, and make it more comfortable. It wasn’t experimental but it was expensive, and the insurance company balked. All they had to do was play a waiting game and they’d win; they had. No real possibilities there.

  Josie’s father doted on her and had given up everything to care for her, even selling the family ranch to have enough money to get her everything short of the treatment he so wanted her to receive. No motive there. Her mother, unable to handle the stress of a sick child and without the strength of her husband whose attention was focused only on his daughter, had bolted. She lived in Montrose now with a new boyfriend, and Clint Beck had confided that he thought she was into drugs and drinking alcohol. Not an uncommon way to deaden the pain of having a dying child and a dead marriage. A great deal of sadness but no one I could see who would seek the services of Proserpine, and I said so.

  “Jane, I’m telling you that child was killed. Can’t you even investigate?”

  I considered his request. I could stretch my jurisdiction to reach that far without doing complete violence to it. It was, after all, the unexpected death of a small child. I pondered what that would do to Clint. I picked up the vial again, gingerly this time, by the edges of the crimped top. Finally, I answered.

  “I don’t think I can justify it. I really can’t. Besides, I’m not sure I could prove it if I did take the case. Even if someone injected her with this, there’d be no way to trace it. And anyone smart enough to use potassium chloride would be smart enough not to put it in the IV fluid, because it’s too much and too easy to trace. Inject it, and there’s a quick, easy death, with nothing to prove except by circumstances. And the circumstances just aren’t there.”

  Father Matt wasn’t listening. He was already putting on his coat, a distracted look on his face. As he bent to pick up his gloves, he muttered, “Thanks, Jane,” and left as quickly as he had come.

  I turned the vial over in my hand once more and then picked up the phone to call the clinic. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and I trusted Father Matt’s instincts more than I let on. I picked up the phone to call the clinic just as it rang. Half an hour later, I hung up and forgot all about Josie in the press of the day’s work.

  ***

  Father Matt ran the few blocks to the clinic, slipping on the ice and nearly — but not quite — falling. He was out of breath when he barreled in the door. The same receptionist was still on duty. It was a wonder they had not sent her home; surely her shift was over by now. A wonder they had not closed down the clinic, for that matter, though he supposed he could see the logic. It was the primary source of care for the town, the newer doc-in-a-box at the other end of town notwithstanding.

  “I forgot something in the room; can I go back?” He spoke in a rush, gasping a bit for breath.

  The woman smiled at him. “Sure, Father. Nobody is in there. And thanks for coming. But what did you leave? We cleaned that room hours ago. Nothing was turned in.”

  He couldn’t think of a plausible lie, so he didn’t reply. He rushed to the room he’d so recently occupied with Clint Beck and Josie. It was clean and tidy, no sign that almost-murder had taken place earlier in the day. He cast about frantically for the trash can. Clean and empty, like the room.

  He stood for a moment in the middle of the room and then went back into the hall. The gray-haired nurse was just about to enter the treatment room next door. It’s a surprise she’s here, thought Matt. Maybe they have long shifts. Twelve to twelve or something like that.

  “I dropped something when I was here; I can’t find it in there,” he stammered to her. “Where do you put the trash? I need to look for it. Very important.” His cheeks flushed; he was unused to prevarication.

  The nurse pointed to an open door at the end of the hall. “Down there. But I didn’t see anything unusual when I cleaned the room. You are more than welcome to look, though.” She entered the exam room with no further word, leaving Father Matt in the hall alone.

  He walked casually to the open door, looked around to make certain he was unobserved, and entered the room.

  The trash held only tissues, papers, and wrappers, but he noticed a large, covered, red container labeled “biohazard.” Feeling as guilty as a schoolboy nicking a test from the teacher’s desk, he removed the lid.

  There it was, lying on top, an IV bag half-empty, labeled with Josie Beck’s name. He pulled it gingerly out of the can, dropped it into one of the extra red bags out of an open box on a nearby counter, and tucked it inside his jacket. He replaced the red lid and backed out of the room.

  As he passed the desk again, the receptionist smiled. “Did you find what you were looking for, Father?”

  Father Matt smiled back and nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “God bless.” I hope I found it, h
e thought, as he started out the glass door and back home to think.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Medical examiners come in two categories: the hyper-organized and the incredibly slovenly. I fall, at least in the professional part of my life and on my better days (which are few and far between), in the former category. Sadie Jackson, the new M.E. in the office, falls squarely in the latter. Her office, even though she’d been part of the team for a few short weeks, was a rat’s nest of papers, files, books, and slide folders. I could barely see her microscope amid the rubble. She and my son Ben were clearly cut from the same bolt of cloth.

  I opened the glass door to her office gingerly, not wanting to send tumbling a precarious stack just outside its clearance. Sadie sat with her back to me, head bent over a book, brown hair in a bun at the nape of her neck that was as messy as her desk. Another difference. I can’t sit with my back to a room.

  “Sadie?”

  Her tousled head jerked up, and she swiveled her chair around. “Hi, boss.”

  “Sadie, I’m about to head out. I was just wondering what was on the table today.”

  “Not much. Just one F.D.I.B., old lady about eighty or so.”

  “F.D.I.B.?” It was taking me some time to get used to Sadie. She came with excellent credentials, good training, and fine recommendations. Now that I was coming out of the fog of mourning the murder of my husband John and finding a life again, I had little desire to spend every waking moment in the Center, so I hired her on a trial basis. I’d been working with her a little over a month. Her skills were excellent, but I found her manner hard to take, a little too cavalier for my taste. There was something unsettling and freewheeling about her, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. I wrote it off to my age and idiosyncrasies; the other staff, more of an age with Sadie, got along fine with her.

  “Found dead in bed. Nothing to angst over.”

  “What did you find?”

  Sadie cocked her head. “Nothing. I didn’t do a post. External exam was normal, at least for someone that age. Nothing suspicious in the report. Family didn’t want an autopsy if we didn’t have to do it.”

  “But you took blood and urine and photographs.”

  The cant of her head increased, and she looked puzzled. “No, I didn’t. Why should I? It’s a waste of resources.”

  I suspected Sadie was more interested in protecting her free time than the Center’s budget but refrained from saying so. “I realize you come from a different environment, Sadie,” I said. “But here, there’s a minimum for every case. Blood, urine, photos. Did it ever occur to you that the request for no autopsy might be because there is something to hide, rather than because there isn’t? Is the body still here?”

  “I think so. I’ll go get those samples now.”

  “And when you are done, re-read the handbook. Make notes if you have to. No cutting corners.” The memory of cut corners that obscured a serial killer last summer still poked at my pride, even though it worked out in the end.

  Sadie turned back to her book, dog-eared a page (I cringed again), and stuffed the book back on the shelf over her desk. As she did, my attention was drawn to a small wooden statue of a figure dressed in an elaborate white gown. The carving was intricate but very much of the folk style so common in Mexico. The carved dress was decorated with bits of lace and seed beads, and the veil was made of sheer fabric edged with the same lace. The figure held a bouquet of pink roses in skeletal hands. I recoiled. Instead of charming, the face was a skull with empty sockets. A scythe and a globe rested at her feet. I stared at it in disbelief. Santa Muerte, so-called “Saint Death,” a hideous caricature of a bride and legitimate Santos. It made my skin crawl.

  Sadie noticed my interest. “Cool, isn’t it? I got that at a medical meeting I went to a few months ago. Good symbol for a medical examiner, isn’t it?“

  “Get rid of it.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Get rid of it. Now. I want it out of this office before you do anything else.”

  “No. This is my office and I like it. You can’t make me take it out just because you don’t like it.”

  “It is an office in the Center. You really do need to read the handbook. No personal items in offices.” I’d written that particular passage in the rules and regs out of an abundance of paranoia. I’d had enough brushes with H.R. law to know that I just did not want to deal with claims of offense of one employee by another. The easiest way to solve that was to sterilize offices of personal décor.

  “Your office has personal stuff in it.”

  “My office is not part of the Center. It’s a common mistake. It has been made before. This is part of the Center. Get rid of it, or I will. And remember that I have the master key, and all offices are subject to random search for security purposes.”

  Sadie shrugged her shoulders, knowing she was bested. “Jeez. No need to get so bent out of shape. It’s just a statue.”

  I softened a bit as I saw her take the figure off the shelf. “It’s not just a figure. It’s…” I struggled with how to make this woman understand. I settled for taking the coward’s way out. “It’s associated with criminals, drug trade, assassination, all sorts of things we work against, Sadie. Black magic, voodoo, Santeria. Plus, it is a mockery of better things. It has no business in a medical examiner’s office.” Especially as long as I am in charge, I thought to myself. No sense tempting evil here any more than it already is.

  “Okay, boss, I get it.” She smiled an easy smile, one that I somehow didn’t trust. “But I bought it because it seems that death is the M.E.’s bride. No death, no job, after all. Best we can hope for is that the deaths we see are good ones, don’t you think?” Her comment was off-handed; Sadie was already rummaging in her backpack. She brought out a wad of keys as disorderly as her office. “I’ll be right back. I want to put this in the apartment. Then I’ll get on that autopsy.” She brushed past me, toppling the pile I had been so careful not to disturb.

  Best we can hope for is that the deaths we see are good deaths. I bent to pick up the scattered papers Sadie left in her wake. Computer printouts of articles and reports were interspersed with unopened junk mail. Trying to give the pile stability it did not deserve, I stacked the mail on top of the printouts.

  I paused at the last piece. Not a mass mailing like so many of the others, this was a fat envelope with an individual address, handwritten, and it had been opened and re-stuffed. On the outside of the envelope was a scrawled note: Call Jake, in Sadie’s unmistakably sloppy hand.

  The return address was for Proserpine. This organization I’d not heard of before was mentioned twice in a day, and if Father Matt was right, one that gave me cause to be suspicious. It made me wonder what Sadie meant by a “good death.” And I wondered just what kind of medical meeting offered Santa Muerte statues for sale.

  ***

  Fiona Idoni, née McLaughlin, formerly Countess of Maldoino, brushed the dark auburn hair the hairdresser had touched up that very afternoon into an elegant knot at the back of her head, smoothing it into place with hands still a bit tender from the ministrations of the plastic surgeon. Still, she was glad someone had invented the technology that gave physicians the ability to make her hands look as smooth as her tucked faced and revised neck. Nothing worse than a woman beginning to show the advance of age and staving it off with bright eyes, smooth cheeks, and wrinkled neck and hands. At least all her parts matched, and she took care to wear dark stockings or slacks, so that the small purple veins emerging on her once-perfect legs did not show.

  The image that looked back at her from the mirror smiled: even white teeth, clear pale skin that had never freckled up, pale blue eyes in a round face, full lips, and a nose that had once been cute as a button but now was just the right shape to have made her peasant face suitable for an Italian count. She saw a place on her temple where the hairdresser had missed an infinitesimal patch of faded and graying hair, and she scowled. She would have a word with her tomorrow.


  A pain as sharp as a sword passed through her head when she touched the line of scar the surgeon had left behind in the hairline, almost as though she had touched a trigger. She grabbed the marble basin and closed her eyes against it until it passed as quickly and sharply as it had come. She looked up again. The trickle of the tear at the corner of her right eye had not yet blurred her carefully applied mascara, and she dabbed it away. She looked down to find that one bright red nail was broken, snapped against the side of the bowl, and she frowned. A few minutes with a file and a bottle of polish, and it was acceptable. Still, the nail should not have broken. Another reason to have a word with the woman at the expensive shop where she had spent all day.

  The ivory sweater she donned was shot through with gold threads like the thin, sleeveless shell she was wearing, and it was crusted with beads at the neck, hem, and cuffs. She fastened a long, unadorned gold chain around her neck and let it drop against the silk of the shell. She regarded the whole effect in the mirror as she smoothed almond-scented cream on her hands, turning her head this way and that until she was satisfied that she was as elegant and attractive as she could be. Pursing her lips together, she turned from the mirror, threw her mink jacket over her arm, and picked up the gold purse lying on the brocade seat of the overstuffed chair in the corner by the door.

  The Maître d’ at the Chop House said that he had reservations for eight. They had not laid eyes on each other since that day, so many years ago, when she fled that dreadful, cold-water flat in the arms of Antonio, the first in a string of lovers, each increasingly wealthy and demanding. She played her hand well, extracting from each a piece of a fortune until here she was, agreeably alone. She thought that she could leave behind the comfort of men and their beds and their demands on her time and her body. She divorced her most recent husband in a display of cold-hearted avarice that left even the tabloids aghast. She took with her money, a home on the coast of Capri, and a sweet little maid to pick up the pieces of her life.