30: Clair and Nash fought the tail end of rush hour traffic and pulled into the emergency room drive of John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital about thirty minutes later. They found Sophie Rodriguez sitting in the corner of the waiting room with Grace Davies, Lili’s mother.
Sophie spotted them as they came through the automated glass doors and quickly walked over to meet them. “We were in their kitchen. I broke the news about Lili, and they took it about as well as could be expected. He was holding his wife, then his body just went limp. She tried to hold him up, but he’s a big guy. He fell to the floor and began to convulse. I dialed 911 immediately, and the paramedics arrived about four minutes later. The convulsions stopped by that point, but his breathing was labored and his heart rate was very low. I had trouble finding a pulse, but when I did, I only recorded about forty beats per minute.”
“Does he have any kind of history?” Clair asked.
Sophie shook her head. “Nothing, according to his wife. He exercises daily. Even with all this going on, he was prepping for a run when I got there, said it helped him clear his head.”
“His daughter is missing, and he wanted to go for a jog?” Nash said.
“People cope in strange ways.” Sophie glanced back at Grace Davies. “She lost her daughter, and now her husband is in ICU. I can’t imagine what she’s going through.”
A doctor pushed through the double doors at the back of the ER, scanned the crowd, and started toward Grace Davies. Clair, Nash, and Sophie rushed back over.
“I am so sorry, Grace,” the doctor said. “This is the last thing you need in your life right now.”
“You know each other?” Clair asked.
The doctor’s eyes went narrow. “And you are?”
“I’m Detective Clair Norton, this is Detective Nash, and Sophie Rodriguez with Missing Children.”
His face softened. “You’re helping to find Lili.” He nodded, then: “She’s such a sweet girl. I’ve known her her entire life. Who would do such a thing?”
Grace’s face went white, and her red, puffy eyes again filled with tears. Sophie put an arm around her.
Clair told the doctor Lili had been found. His eyes were on Grace Davies the entire time. When she finished, he took a deep breath. “This is horrible.” He went to Grace and wrapped his arms around her, whispered something at her ear.
“How do you know the Davies family?” Clair asked.
“Randal works here in Oncology. I’ve been head of ER going on six years now, we’re a tight group at this hospital,” the doctor said. “Randal and I both completed our residency at McGaw.”
Nash took a step closer. “What is Dr. Davies’s condition? Is he going to pull through?”
“He’s stable for now, but the stroke may have caused permanent damage. I’m waiting for the results of the CT scan to come back.” He released Mrs. Davies and took a step back. “Grace, how long has Randal been taking lisinopril?”
The woman’s forehead puckered. “What’s lisinopril?”
“It’s used to regulate high blood pressure.”
“Randal doesn’t have high blood pressure.”
The doctor placed a hand on her shoulder. “Is it possible he had high blood pressure and didn’t want to tell you? Maybe he didn’t want to worry you.”
Mrs. Davies shook her head. She pulled her phone from her purse and began tapping at the screen. “He doesn’t have high blood pressure. We both test a few times each week with this Bluetooth cuff he brought home from a conference last year.” She handed him the phone. “See, it records our results.”
The doctor scrolled through the readings. “These are all normal.”
“Randal exercises daily,” she told him. “At his last physical, the doctor told him he was as fit as a thirty-year-old.”
“If that’s the case, we have a serious problem,” the doctor said, stroking his chin.
Clair had remained silent through all of this. Something was wrong. “What is it?”
At first the doctor didn’t speak, lost in his own thoughts. Then: “We found a concentrated level of lisinopril in his blood. If I had to guess, he took a rather large dose—three, maybe four hundred milligrams.”
“What’s considered normal?” Nash asked.
“Anywhere from two-point-five milligrams to forty, no more than that.”
Clair turned to Sophie, but before she could ask her a question, Sophie started nodding. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking . . . we were in the kitchen. I had a glass of water, Mrs. Davies was drinking—”
“I was drinking orange juice,” Mrs. Davies said. “Randal made a pot of coffee. I don’t drink coffee. It tends to keep me up at night.”
“You think someone spiked the coffee?” Nash said to Clair.
Clair began to speak, then pulled him aside, outside of earshot. “Our unsub killed Ella Reynolds’s father,” she said in a low voice.
“He strangled and nearly removed the head of Ella Reynolds’s father with piano wire,” Nash said. “This a drug overdose, hardly the same MO. Maybe Dr. Davies had high blood pressure and was self-medicating to manage the condition, hiding it from his wife for some reason. Who else takes their blood pressure on a regular basis at home?”
Clair raised her wrist and showed him her Apple Watch. “This thing tracks every step I make during the day, monitors my heart rate, it even tells me when I’ve been on my ass too long. Everyone is tracking their health stats these days.” She poked his oversize belly. “Everyone should be, anyway.”
“I’m comfortably plump, Clair-bear. I don’t need some gizmo on my wrist to remind me of that four times per day.”
“If a normal dose is two-point-five milligrams to forty, and he had ten times that, it’s no accident. Someone tried to kill him,” Clair said.
“It could be a suicide attempt,” Nash pointed out.
“Only one way to find out,” Clair said. She pulled out her phone, dialed Metro. “I’m getting CSI out there.”
Nash nodded reluctantly. “I’ll ask Mrs. Davies where she hides the spare key.”