Ned Oblanski’s voice threw an edge that Arn picked up on immediately. “Meet me at the hospital. I need that outside set of eyes.”
“What’s going on?” Arn asked, but Oblanski had already disconnected.
When Arn arrived at Cheyenne Regional, a security guard stood by the entrance to escort him to a downstairs conference room. The guard shut the door, leaving Arn alone in the room not only with Oblanski, but also with a man he recognized as the hospital’s chief of security and a gray-haired woman with an ID around her neck proclaiming her the hospital spokeswoman.
“Better sit for this one,” Oblanski said. He didn’t look like he’d slept for days as he introduced the chief of security, Captain Moore, and hospital public relations spokeswoman Hennessey.
Arn set his hat on one end of the conference table and took a chair across from Oblanski, who nodded to the security chief standing in front of a big screen TV. Moore punched a remote. A security camera monitoring a long hallway had recorded people walking by a uniformed policeman Arn recognized as the one he’d spoken with outside Johnny’s room right after the shooting. The policeman kept his head buried in a Sports Illustrated as people walked by, and Moore tapped the screen. “This was a minute before.”
“Before what?” Arn asked.
“Before that.” Oblanski stood and approached the television. “Freeze it!” A doctor in a white lab coat, cap, and face mask walked past the policeman and entered a room. “He’s in there exactly fifty-three seconds.”
Moore resumed the recording, and Arn watched the tape counter. Fifty-three seconds later, the doctor emerged from the room. The man glanced nonchalantly to one side, his face away from the camera, before disappearing down the hallway and off camera. “Just what are we looking at?” Arn asked.
Hennessey looked at Arn like he was little more than an annoyance in the room. She smoothed her gray skirt and scowled at Oblanski. “We were informed that no extra security precautions were needed.” She nodded to the chief of security. “Or we would have provided it.” She leaned on the table and stared at Oblanski. “The hospital holds no culpability in Mr. White’s death.”
“Johnny’s dead?” Arn said, sounding like so many people he’d given final notification to through the years: full of disbelief. Full of denial. “I just checked with the nurses’ station a couple hours ago. Johnny was doing well. What the hell happened?”
“It was nothing hospital personnel did,” the woman said.
“I think you’d better leave us now,” Oblanski told her. “We really need to talk alone.”
“Not if it involves the hospital.”
“Please,” Oblanski said, but it came out as a stern order rather than a simple request.
Hennessey huffed once before slamming the door on her way out.
“What happened?” Arn repeated.
“Like I said, this guy was in Johnny’s room for fifty-three seconds. Twenty seconds after that, alerts went to the nurses’ station that Johnny had coded.”
“Our trauma unit rushed in,” Moore said. “But Johnny was gone.”
“When the nurses … ” Oblanski closed his eyes and pinched his nose, breathing deeply to calm himself. “When the nurses called for the trauma team, Officer Blake went in there with them.”
“The kid outside Johnny’s room?”
Oblanski nodded. “He tried his best to preserve what evidence there was, in case Johnny’s death wasn’t natural. But the team tramped all over. If there was any evidence, it got wiped away quickly.”
“The team had to get in there as quickly—”
“I know,” Oblanski said to Moore. “I know. It’s just that we don’t have squat on the killer.”
“Did Blake hear anything while the guy was in there?”
“Nothing.”
“You sure it was murder?” Arn asked.
“Blake’s down at the PD now making a statement,” Oblanski said. “But in a nutshell, when he followed the trauma team in, the first thing he noticed was Johnny’s pillow on the floor. It had bloody smears on the pillowcase.” Oblanski buried his face in his hands. “The guy put the pillow over Johnny’s face hard enough that it broke his nose. He bled all over the pillow.”
“So Johnny was smothered?”
“Most likely,” Oblanski answered. “We’ll know at autopsy.” He kicked the table leg. “If I hadn’t gone on television claiming we were close to solving Butch’s murder—and Johnny’s shooting—” He glared at Arn. He said no more, but there was an unspoken accusation between them: if Arn hadn’t suggested Oblanski go on air with Ana Maria that second time with such false claims, Johnny may have been on his way to recovery. Rather than parked on a steel table awaiting autopsy.
“Tell me someone recognized this guy,” Arn said.
Oblanski nodded to Moore, who aimed the remote at the TV and rewound the recording. “I had all my officers view the tape. Along with a dozen of the senior hospital staff. The mask and cap hid his features.”
“So we’re looking for a doctor?”
“Probably not,” Moore answered. “He was dressed like a physician, but everyone agreed he wasn’t any doctor working here.”
Arn slumped in his chair, feeling as if life had just drop kicked him through goal posts he wasn’t prepared for. “How the hell does someone impersonate a doctor and no one notice?”
“The mask,” Moore answered. “Hospital personnel who fail to get a flu shot by the deadline date have got to wear a mask by policy. People saw him walking masked-up and just figured he missed his flu shot.” Moore started the recording once again. “This guy knew where he was going even though he didn’t work here. As you can see”—he pointed to the hallway—“he was in and out with no one paying him any mind.”
Oblanski stood and paced in front of the television. “He went into Johnny’s room at shift change when nurses on the floor are normally in their shift briefing. This guy knew his way around.”
“Or studied hospital policy and procedure,” Arn pointed out. “Can Officer Blake tell us anything about the guy?”
“He said he was taller than average.”
“That’s it? What the hell was he doing, sleeping?”
“Screw you,” Oblanski said. “Not every officer sleeps on duty. Blake was ordered to keep everyone out of Johnny’s room except hospital personnel. And”—he jerked his thumb at the television screen—“the guy was damned sure dressed like hospital staff.”
Arn studied the screen again. The killer walked by Officer Blake and into Johnny’s room as calmly as he would walk into Starbucks for his morning latte.
“We locked the hospital down as soon as this happened,” Moore said. “And I pulled all the security tapes from two hours before that.”
“There’s nothing unusual on them.” Oblanski anticipated Arn’s question. “It’s not visiting hours, so there weren’t a lot of people: three construction workers coming in for a bite at the cafeteria. A nurse’s assistant and a janitor tall enough to be our man. But all checked out.”
“If he got into our hospital,” Moore said, “it was from the only entrance with no camera.”
“Could you play that again,” Arn asked, and Moore rewound and started the recording. “This guy came up on the camera’s blind side. And when he came out of Johnny’s room, he looked to the side where the camera couldn’t pick up his face. This guy either knows the hospital or he cased it.” He turned to Moore. “Pull the security tapes from the day Johnny was shot until now.”
“That’s last Friday.”
“It is.”
“What do I do with them?” Moore asked.
“Sit down with your staff and review them. If this guy came in to get a lay of the hospital floor, he’ll be on tape.”
“But that’ll take—”
“Moore,” Oblanski said, and Moore nodded.
“You mentioned there was an entrance with no surveillance cameras,” Arn said.
Moore turned off the TV. “First floor maintenance door. It’s where deliveries are made. It’s in the old part of the hospital. Most delivery people—UPS, Post Office, medical company suppliers—all have keys.”
“And who would know that besides delivery folks?”
“Everyone at the hospital,” Moore said. “It’s even covered in first-day orientation.”
When Captain Moore left to pull the tapes and make a copy for them, Arn turned to Oblanski. “Johnny’s death was neither of our faults. Whoever this is”—he pointed to the freeze-framed killer on the monitor—“is calculating. He thinks things through. He’s undoubtedly Johnny’s shooter, and he knew if Johnny came to, he might identify him.”
Oblanski stuffed his lip with Copenhagen, hospital policy be damned. “Moore’s going to pull the tapes. But we don’t have squat on this guy. Unless he’s a sprinter and made it out of the hospital before it was locked down, he’s common enough to blend in with everyone else here at the time. But maybe something will turn up with delivery companies.” Oblanski had called the detective division and given them a listing of every company who delivered to the hospital, to find out which of delivery people had a key to the maintenance door.
He grabbed a pencil lying on the conference table and chewed the end until it broke. Just like Johnny did. “I had to call the mayor when this happened,” he continued. “He’s made an emergency appointment. I’m now the permanent police chief, though I wish to hell Johnny were still in that position.”
Arn leaned back and rubbed his forehead. “I’ve been looking closely at Steve and Gaylord’s deaths in relation to Butch.”
“Go on.”
“I can, with a degree of certainty, say that Steve’s death was no accident.”
“Bullshit! Bobbie Madden was there—”
“Every investigator makes mistakes. Even someone as experienced as Madden was.” Arn explained about the single feather Dr. Rough had found in Steve’s windpipe. “The photos show two pillows—they look like couch pillows to me—partially burned and lying on the floor beside the recliner. I think someone smothered Steve with a couch pillow and started that fire. And he may have been killed a full day before the fire.”
“What the hell’s that?” Oblanski poured water from a pitcher in the middle of the table. “How did you come up with that conclusion?”
“Rough noted larvae found in Steve’s throat, meaning flies fed on the body and went through their cycle. It would put the time of death at least a day before. Probably a mite more.”
“You didn’t know Steve DeBoer, but he was a stout guy. Someone just didn’t smother him without a fight.” Oblanski looked around for another pencil. “And the photos clearly show there was no struggle. How do you account for that?”
Arn shook his head. “I can’t yet. But if I could look at the evidence … ”
“It wasn’t saved. Steve’s death was ruled accidental and everything connected was destroyed years ago. Besides, right now I got too much to do worrying about Johnny’s murder.”
Arn stood and walked to the monitor. “There’s just too much that points to all this”—he tapped the screen—“being tied in with Butch’s murder. Whether it was Frank Dull Knife as you suspected, or the Five Point Killer like Johnny thought, you need to admit that ten years ago, someone killed Steve as well as Butch. And he killed another officer today.”
Oblanski slumped lower in his chair. “What can I do?”
“Assign as many officers as you can spare to reopen Steve’s case.”
Oblanski tried rubbing new forehead wrinkles of responsibility. With Johnny’s death, he’d inherited more headaches than he’d bargained for. “I have to talk with the crime scene tech working Johnny’s hospital room. When I finish, I’ll go to my office and start freeing up people to work on the connection between Butch and Steve.”
Arn motioned to the monitor, which was showing the man in the mask and gown turning away from the camera. “And tell your guys to be on their toes. I wouldn’t want to meet this guy unprepared.”