The EMTs let me ride in the ambulance with Hal once the girl—whose name I learned was Cora because she started spouting her personal information as soon as the police cars rolled up—told them I’d almost been run down, too.
Somewhere on the ride to the hospital, Hal’s pulse turned thready, and I stopped thinking about Otto and started praying. Hard.
I called Anderson and got Hal’s home phone number. Margo needed to know what was going on long before the hospital or police would be able to contact her. It was what I’d want if the roles were reversed and Mark was close to coding in an ambulance. I’d want my best possible chance to make it to the hospital.
Margo answered, and I skipped the hello and went straight to There’s been an accident. I explained as quickly as I could what had happened.
Margo cursed. “I tried to tell him there were other ways to help people. That he didn’t need to be a human meat shield to be of service.” She let out a breath that sounded like it was the last line of defense between her and tears. “I’m coming. Please stay on the phone with me. I want to know what’s happening. What they’re doing to him.”
That didn’t sound like the safest way to drive, but I wasn’t going to argue with her. If I didn’t give her the play-by-play, she’d only drive more recklessly to get here sooner.
Two women and a man, all wearing scrubs, met us at the emergency room doors and swarmed the gurney the EMTs had put Hal on. They rolled him inside.
Hal convulsed on the stretcher.
“His throat’s swelling shut,” one of the female staff members said. From the way the others deferred to her, I would have guessed she was the doctor and they were the nurses. “We need to get him intubated.”
It wasn’t like on the medical shows on TV. There wasn’t yelling or running. It all felt like a play where everyone had practiced their parts and knew exactly what role they needed to fill.
Everyone except me. And Margo.
I repeated to her everything that was going on.
One of the nurses drew liquid into a syringe from a vial and dropped the not-quite-empty vial into the pocket of her scrubs. She injected the fluid into Hal’s leg. He stopped moving.
Was that what it was supposed to do? Or was this a new complication?
I told Margo. I was beginning to feel like a sportscaster at the world’s most awful event.
“What are they giving him?” Margo said.
A horn blared in the background on her end, and I flinched. Hopefully she paid enough attention to her driving to not get into a wreck. Their kids didn’t need both parents in the hospital—or worse.
“He’s allergic to penicillin,” she said. “Make sure they know.”
I moved in as close as I could without getting in the way. “His wife wants to know what you’re giving him. He’s allergic to penicillin.”
“We found the dog tag with his allergy,” the nurse said. “We’re giving him succinylcholine so we can get a breathing tube into him.”
Earlier on in this case, I’d wanted to know how SUX worked. Now I was getting a close-up look.
Hal lay limp on the gurney. The nurses went to work inserting a breathing tube. I looked away and met the lady doctor’s gaze.
“You shouldn’t be here.” The doctor shot a where’s-her-babysitter glare at me. “We don’t have time for twenty questions.”
“She needs to be examined, too,” a familiar man’s voice said from behind me. “She’s pregnant, and the EMTs said she fell during the hit-and-run.”
I whirled around.
Zach stood nearby. He wore the same scrubs, and the same tired expression, he’d had the day we first met. “Let’s get you checked in and into a bed.”
I told Margo they weren’t going to let me stay with Hal anymore.
“I’m pulling up anyway,” she said.
At least with her here, Hal would have someone who could advocate for him. It also meant they’d give her updates. Without her here, they wouldn’t tell me anything about his condition as things progressed. I wasn’t even family.
Zach helped me up onto a bed and handed me a clipboard with paperwork on it. “What happened?”
My eyes struggled to focus on the papers. I shifted my gaze back to where I’d last seen Hal. They’d taken him away into a private room. “We were investigating a lead in Jordan’s murder. You remember the name Otto Corder from the list of phone numbers?”
Zach nodded.
“We think he and your father robbed an armored car together, and Jordan found out. He might have killed her because she wanted to expose him.”
That part still didn’t line up. If Jordan had planned to expose Otto, why not do it rather than calling him? But it was the best theory we had at the moment, and Otto had tried to kill us for asking questions.
“My dad might have known Otto stole money, and he might have told Jordan about it before he died, but I can’t believe he was involved.” Zach handed me a hospital gown. “You probably don’t have long before the police show up to question you, so you might want to change quickly.”
Zach pulled the curtain around my bed.
I set the paperwork aside and slid into the gown. I tied the lower two ties, providing me modesty on my lower half, but I couldn’t reach the upper one. As much as I’d like to blame the baby, I’d never been very flexible.
I crawled back up onto the bed and continued with the paperwork, but the gown kept slipping off my shoulders. Finishing the paperwork took twice as long. Between worrying about Hal, wondering if the police caught Otto, and fussing about the gown slipping too low when I wasn’t paying attention, I couldn’t concentrate.
“Nicole,” Zach said from the other side of the curtain, “the police have some questions for you before the doctor sees you. Are you ready for them to come in?”
I was technically decent, but I wasn’t going to be able to focus with the gown the way it was. Zach was my client, but he was also a nurse. He was the best option I had for help at present. Anderson promised to call Mark for me, but at best, Mark would still be a few minutes out. I’d made Anderson promise to have him swing by the office and grab a copy of the case files before he came. I wanted to check the knots as soon as possible so I could tell the police if they matched. I’d hoped the police would be a bit slower about questioning me.
“Could you come in first?” I said to Zach. “I need a hand with something.”
Zach ducked through the crack between the curtains.
I held the top of the gown up with one hand and pointed toward my back with the other. Heat crept up my cheeks. My back wasn’t exactly a private place, but it still felt weird. “I couldn’t finish.”
Zach gave one of the first smiles I’d ever seen from him. It felt trained—like it was the one he practiced for patients to make them feel more comfortable. If that was the case, it worked. The flames that felt like they were nipping at my cheeks died down.
Zach knotted the top tie securely. “Guaranteed not to slip,” he said.
He let the two officers in, a man and a woman. I went through everything I could remember.
It wasn’t much. I hadn’t seen Hal get hit. I hadn’t seen the driver of the vehicle. I hadn’t even seen the vehicle except in Cora’s pictures.
God was looking out for us by having Cora there. The police should easily be able to arrest Otto based on her statement and that picture.
Mark arrived as they were finishing up. He laid a hand on the brown oversized envelop tucked under his arm and raised his eyebrows at me as if to say You really needed this now?
He’d understand once I told him why.
Both officers glanced up.
Officer Kincaid—the younger of the two—did a double-take. He shot to his feet and extended his hand to Mark. “You’re Dr. Cavanaugh. I attended both your sessions at the forensics conference in Portland last year. I’m hoping to move into homicide one day.”
His voice had the same breathy quality that most people got when talking to a movie star. It was too bad my mom wasn’t here to see it. She’d have loved it.
Mark had his feet and hips angled toward me like he wanted to make sure I was alright, but he smiled at the man anyway. He pulled a business card out of his pocket. “You can give me a call anytime if you have questions.”
The officer accepted the card in a way that reminded me again of a normal person accepting the autograph of a famous athlete.
The older female officer slid a glance in my direction and covered her mouth with her hand like she was trying to hide a smile. Like she knew that, given they were investigating a hit-and-run, she shouldn’t be trying not to laugh right now, but she couldn’t quite help it.
Officer Kincaid looked at me as well, and his smile fell off his face, turning his lips down. The matching last name must have finally registered, and he was wondering if Mark was thinking he’d never make it as a homicide detective if he missed something obvious like that. Or that he was callous and self-absorbed because he was telling Mark about himself when his wife was lying in a hospital bed.
Knowing Mark the way I did, he wasn’t thinking either of those things. He loved it when anyone showed an interest in forensic pathology.
The female officer rose to her feet. “Thank you for your help, Mrs. Cavanaugh. We’ll be in touch if we have any more questions.”
Officer Kincaid mumbled an additional thanks to Mark and slinked out of the curtained area after her. If he’d been a puppy, his tail would have been between his legs.
Mark sank heavily into the chair vacated by the female officer. “Are you sure you’re alright? Anderson said you were, but he hadn’t seen you, and neither has a doctor.”
“Thanks to Hal, I don’t have anything worse than a splinter.”
I filled him in on what I knew of Hal’s condition, then made a gimme gimme gesture with my hands toward the file.
Mark passed it over. “Want to tell me what’s going on and why this file was more important than me getting here quickly?”
I pulled the photocopies out of the envelope and flipped through them. “Jordan was hung with a weird knot. I saw another weird knot when we were talking to Otto. I’m hoping they match.”
If they did, it could also be another reason Otto tried to run us down. He might have seen me taking the pictures and realized what I was doing.
I handed Mark half the papers. We could find it faster working together, and I wanted to check for a match before the doctor came to examine me.
Mark turned a sheet of paper to face me. “Found it.”
I grabbed my phone and tapped through to my camera. The first photo I’d taken was too blurry. I swiped to the second one. Perfect.
I enlarged it and looked back and forth between it and the picture Mark held.
My heart felt like it dipped down in my chest and rested close to where the baby sat.
They didn’t match. There was enough of a similarity that they could easily be mistaken for each other if you weren’t holding them side by side, but once you did, the differences stood out.
Mark raised his eyebrows, and I shook my head.
I might have gotten Hal hurt for nothing.
No, not entirely for nothing. We might not have Otto for Jordan’s murder yet, but we must have been right about his role in the old armored car robbery. He wouldn’t have run us down otherwise.
And he could still be the person who murdered Jordan, even though these knots didn’t match. He knew about knots. He might have chosen a different one for that situation.
If that were the case, it was going to come down to either getting him to confess or finding another knot we could prove he’d tied that matched. Without the confession, I’d be able to cast reasonable doubt during Zach’s trial, but the police wouldn’t likely pursue Otto instead of Zach for her murder.
I ran through it all again with Mark while we waited for the doctor. The only thing we came up with were more questions. Like where was the money if Otto Corder and Hank Williams had robbed the armored car? Both of them had appeared to live average lives, and Zach hadn’t mentioned a large sum of money that they discovered once his father passed away.
The police suspected Zach killed Jordan in part because of their inheritance. She’d gotten the house, and he hadn’t gotten any sort of equal monetary compensation. There hadn’t been any large sums of money left over to inherit. What their father had left had only finished paying off the house and his medical bills.
Even with the strokes their father suffered in his final year of life, there should have been money left over. The amount stolen from the armored car would have easily covered his medical expenses and then some. Besides, wouldn’t Hank Williams have paid his mortgage off long ago if he’d had that kind of money?
And surely the police would have asked the banks to flag any unusually large deposits either man made in the year, or even years, following the robbery.
The money was off the grid.
The curtain swished aside before we could start building any theories. I looked up expecting to see the doctor.
Zach pulled the curtains closed again instead, as if they could block out sound rather than just sight. “I’m headed home for the day, but first I have good news and bad news.”