Day 15 – Friday evening
Cooperative Hall
The Cooperative Hall that night was bustling with the preparations for the coming holidays. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve and, in another week, it would be Hogmanay.
“How does this look?” Ginny asked.
“Up a little on the port side.”
She grinned at Jim. “Port, huh? Feeling nautical are we?”
He smiled. “I was just thinking how much fun it would be to take a Windjammer cruise, with you.”
“Those are the ones on the big sailboats, aren’t they?”
“Ships. Tall ships, with real sails. The wind in your face, the sun on your back, the salt spray on your lips.”
He helped her down from the step stool and Ginny found both of her hands captured and pressed to his chest, his eyes on hers.
“It would make a very romantic honeymoon.”
Ginny lifted an eyebrow. “Judging by the look in your eye, a bride might wonder which you loved more, the ship or her.”
He shook his head. “As lovely as a tall ship can be, no creation of wood and canvas can match flesh and blood. She would have no doubt who came first. But give me a bride who delights in the wonders of the world and I will make her a happy wife.”
Ginny smiled up at him. “Here comes Caroline. You’d better give me back my hands or she might draw the wrong conclusion.”
“Too late. I saw you two lovebirds.” Caroline dropped into a chair set along the wall and looked from one to the other. “You'd better hurry up and get married and have children before you get yourselves killed.”
Jim objected. “Wouldn’t it be better not to have the children first, if all we’re planning to do is die young?”
“Not for you. We need an heir. So you’d better get busy.”
Ginny blushed. “Did anyone ever suggest you need a filter between your brain and your mouth?”
“Many times. I just ignore them.” Caroline leaned forward, eyeing Ginny. “What you need to do is find out who killed Phyllis and get this whole thing settled.”
“I’m trying!” Ginny protested.
“Okay, so where are you in the investigation?”
Ginny pulled a chair up and sat down. Jim straddled another. “We’ve narrowed the suspect pool to three.”
“Unless you count the mysterious outsider who could have slipped in, done the dirty deed, and slipped out again unseen,” Jim added.
Ginny shook her head. “I don’t believe in him. Someone would have mentioned a stranger.”
“So who’s left?”
“Lisa, Marjorie Hawkins, and Grace.”
Caroline chewed on her lip. “Well, if you ask me—”
“I didn’t.”
Caroline gave her a dirty look, then continued. “The stories all say the most likely suspect is the person who saw her alive last. So, who babysat while she went to the bathroom?”
“Marjorie Hawkins.” Ginny frowned, remembering the discrepancy.
“What?” Caroline asked.
“It may not mean anything. She was in and out of almost all the rooms at some point that night.”
“But?”
“She didn’t sound the alarm.”
Caroline gave her a shrewd look. “Explain, please.”
“We cover for one another all the time, and sometimes things happen to pull us away, but if that happens to me, I go back later, just to make sure the patients are still alive.”
“And she didn’t do that?”
“I think she did. The four o’clock vital signs were done and she signed for the meds.”
“So, where’s the problem?”
“When the nurse I cover for comes back, she usually asks if anything happened. It’s sort of a mini-report. Not formal and not documented.”
“Okay. And?”
“I actually looked at one of those patients, after the day shift pointed out that Phyllis was missing. The patient was fine.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
Ginny nodded. “The thing is, she shouldn’t have been.”
Jim was watching her intently. “Can you be more specific?”
“Well, she was on a ventilator and the respiratory therapists were managing those, so her airway was clear and the machine was working.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
Ginny screwed up her face. “She got her four a.m. medications and vital signs, which is also okay. But there was something odd, and I didn’t realize what it meant until just now.”
“Go on,” Caroline said.
Ginny turned to her friend. “Do you know what TPN is?”
“No.”
“It’s a way of feeding a patient through a big intravenous line. The fluid is delivered via pump, because it’s dangerous and needs to stay on schedule so it doesn’t cause big shifts in glucose and electrolytes and fluid volumes.”
“Sounds serious.”
Ginny nodded. “When I got into the room, the pump had been set to a keep-open rate. There was still fluid in the bag, enough for several more hours, so I wasn’t worried. I just told myself the oncoming nurse would deal with it. But it shouldn’t have been set to run so slowly. You only do that when the bag is almost empty and you’re waiting for the new one to come up from the pharmacy.”
“Okay. So whoever changed the pump setting didn’t want to have to deal with plugging in the new bag.”
“It’s more than just the bag. The tubing and dressing also have to be changed, to prevent infection. It’s a routine night shift duty.”
“What’s your point?”
Ginny looked from Caroline to Jim, then back to Caroline. “Someone turned it down so she wouldn’t have to do all that work.”
“Again, what’s your point?”
“In the usual course of things, anyone who had to respond to a low volume alarm would have raised the roof. Where in the hell was Phyllis? Why wasn’t she doing her job? But no one said a thing. Whoever it was just turned down the pump and walked away.”
“Would your Head Nurse have done that?”
Ginny gave a small shrug. “I wouldn’t have thought so, but she was one very busy woman that night. She might have meant to follow up on it and been prevented.”
Caroline leaned forward. “Is there some way to find out who it was?”
“I can look at the patient-cam images to see if the IV pump showed.”
“Okay, so what will that tell us? There’s a lazy nurse among you?”
Ginny was frowning now. “It should tell us who killed Phyllis.”
Jim leaned forward. “How?”
She turned to face him, still trying to sort out the reasoning in her mind. “It’s not just laziness. It’s negligence.”
Jim nodded. “Not following the doctor’s orders, the patient could have been injured.”
“Right. Which implies that whoever turned down the rate didn’t want to draw attention to the fact Phyllis was missing.”
“Sounds reasonable, but—?”
Ginny shrugged. “If it was the murderer, why didn’t she just let the pump go dry? All she’d have to say is, ‘Phyllis came back from the bathroom, and I went back to work.’ That would have muddied the timeline considerably.”
Jim nodded. “I follow.”
“So do I,” said Caroline.
“So where’s the benefit in resetting the pump?”
“Other than delaying the alarm, you mean.”
Ginny nodded, her frown deepening. “Why would someone kill Phyllis, then sneak in to take care of her patients? It would jeopardize the alibi if she showed up on camera in Phyllis’ rooms, but failed to mention she was MIA. Would someone capable of strangling a fellow nurse care enough about the patients to take that risk?”
Caroline shook her head. “I don’t think it can be the same person. There must be some other explanation.”
Ginny nodded. “And I could still be wrong. It was a crazy night. Any one of us might have run in, made a temporary adjustment, meaning to come back and make a more permanent one later, and run out again, and gotten caught in the next disaster.”
“So, does this exonerate all the nurses, on the grounds of conscience?” Jim asked. “Because, if it does, we have to look elsewhere.”
Ginny sighed. "And I’m fresh out of suspects.”
* * *
Friday night
Zimmerman residence
Marge Hawkins sat in her car on the dark side of the block and watched the front door of the house. Random cars turned into the street and cruised slowly past, looking at the Christmas decorations. She perched her phone on the steering wheel and made sure it was lit, so the curious could see what she was doing, be bored, and move on.
It had already been a long day. She’d completed her preparations for tomorrow, done some Christmas shopping, and paused for a late lunch, only to find Maria Perez’s child right under her nose. She had followed the older Forbes woman to a children’s shelter, and seen the boy turned over to the caretaker there. A bit of research told her the shelter was genuine, but private, under the control of the Scottish community. It seemed unlikely she would get a chance to speak to the boy, much less abduct him.
This target would be different. There would be no protector between her and him, but neither did she want to confront him. What she wanted was to leave a little early Christmas present for him, then slip away.
She’d seen him moving around inside and was beginning to wonder if he was in for the night when the door opened and he emerged, striding down the front walk, camera bag over his shoulder. He climbed into the car parked at the curb and drove off without paying the slightest bit of attention to her.
She waited for five minutes, then approached the door, tools in hand. The lock was a standard double-keyed deadbolt, no additional lock on the handle. The pick gun got her inside in less than twenty seconds. The keypad to the alarm was mounted beside the door, whining at her as the one minute delay counted down. She consulted her notes, then punched in the access code she’d gotten through the simple expedient of recording (using a bionic ear) the sounds made by Zimmerman as he enabled the device, then translating the tones to numbers and letters.
Once safely in, she headed for the kitchen. She’d read somewhere that the thing to do was to dip a spoon in the poison and let it dry. The substance would be totally invisible and all the victim would have to do was stir once. She opened the drawers in turn until she found the cutlery and a neat little stack of spoons.
She pulled the top one out and stepped over to the sink. She carefully poured one milliliter of the neurotoxin into the bowl of the spoon, then rocked it back and forth until it covered the surface completely. She had enough to anoint the back as well. She blew on it, to hasten the drying.
When she could see no more glisten of wetness on either surface, she put the spoon back on the top of the stack, set the alarm, and let herself out of the house. She could not lock the door with the tools she had, but he probably wouldn’t even notice. He would put the key in the lock, turn it, and expect the door to open, and it would.
So now all she had to do was wait. It was lucky she’d made friends with that toxicologist on the last dive. He’d been most helpful in the matter of fugu poison. Quite knowledgeable and quite clueless. She should send him a small token of thanks and ask him where he was headed next. Perhaps they could go diving together again. With the blackmailer finally off her back—the right one this time—she’d be able to afford another trip.
* * *