Skies of Ash (11 page)

I had known Spencer Brooks for more than a decade—both professionally and personally. He was a good friend of my girl Syeeda McKay, and that meant Brooks and I had bonded over margaritas, baskets of onion strings,
and
gunshot wounds.

On this morning, though, since neither of us smelled of tequila or grease, and since this building smelled of pine cleaner and formaldehyde, I addressed Brooks by his title—doctor—and he called me by mine—detective.

“Almost ten o’clock,” he said to me. “You’re late.” He clutched a folder in one hand and swiped at his sweaty forehead with the other. “We started at seven this morning.”

“Me being late is like Halley’s Comet streaking across the sky.”

“A rare and precious thing,” he admitted. “However, you’ve missed out.”

“Next time.” In our line of work, there was always a “next time.”

“Colin’s finishing up with Chloe right now,” Brooks said. “And we’ll hold them until the family sends the hearses.”

“How did he do today?”

“Better. Kept his mouth shut, and when he opened it, I didn’t want to take a saw to him.” Brooks shrugged. “I hate him less than I did last week.”

“He remember to show you the photos of the crime scene this time?”

“Yep.”

“He remember to bring you the preliminary report?”

“Yep.”

“Helpful?”

“Finally.” He pushed back his silver wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“So what can you tell me?”

“Sy called.”

I twisted my lips, then said, “Already?”

He nodded.

“And you told her…?”

“That I hadn’t even started the autopsies yet.”

I narrowed my eyes and studied him: Brooks had a crush on Syeeda, and sometimes he fed her tips for stories. “How did she take that?”

He shrugged. “She thinks I’m conspiring with you to keep her in the dark.”

I rolled my eyes. “So the Chatmans?”

Brooks opened the folder and flipped to a page. “They ate dinner several hours before they died. Beef, asparagus, potatoes. I smelled dairy, too.”

“There were milk shake glasses on the sink.”

“That explains the strawberries.” He found another sheet. “We did a preliminary tox on all three. Juliet had alcohol in her system. But booze didn’t come up in all three screens.”

“What did?”

“Large amounts of Valium. But I found no pills—the drug had been fully absorbed before they died.”

“No one got up,” I said, “because they were all knocked out.”

“Perhaps. Usually diazepam won’t kill. There have been instances where people take forty pills and suffer nothing more than losing two days to sleep. Sometimes, the body goes into deep coma, and then you need medical intervention, like several doses of flumazenil. For the Chatmans, since there wasn’t an antidote around and oxygen became depleted by the fire…” He shook his head.

“But Juliet came to,” I said. “She grabbed her gun, then made a 911 call saying that something was trying to kill her.”

He scrunched his eyebrows. “What time was that?”

“Don’t know. I’ll find out and get back to you.” I scribbled a reminder in my notepad. “So the Valium slowed them down and the carbon monoxide from the fire finished the job.”

“Basically.”

“Who had the Valium scrip?” I asked.

“Don’t know. And you’ll need a court order to find out. But it certainly contributed to their unconscious state and, ultimately, to their deaths.”

I added another to-do item to my growing list—so many things to do, so many things I didn’t know.

“Speaking of CO
₂
,” he said. “I measured levels in their blood.”

“And?”

“More in Juliet—she was breathing heavily before she died.”

“Panicked, maybe. Or trying to escape.”

Brooks shrugged. “Chloe had almost twice the amount of Valium in her blood than Cody, but he died sooner—rigor mortis was more established in him than his sister.”

“Cody’s bedroom was closer to the point of origin,” I said. “Right next to the bathroom.”

The door to the chamber opened. Brooks’s assistant Big Reuben, a black dude as large as Mount Rushmore, filled the tiny foyer even though he had only poked out his head. “We need you in here, Doc. What’s up, Detective Norton?”

“On the hunt,” I said.

Colin looked over to us and cocked his head.

I gave him a quick wave.

“You late,” Big Reuben said.

I nodded. “I’m aware.”

Big Reuben said, “All right, then,” and backed out of the door.

“I’ll give Taggert the swabs and clippings and all of that once we’re finished,” Brooks said, handing me the folder he’d been holding. “But this is for you right now. After you read this, you may want to talk to her doctors.”

“I found her planner last night,” I said. “She had appointments back on Thursday, Monday, and yesterday with an ob-gyn. Was Juliet pregnant?”

“According to my blood tests,” Brooks said, “no, she was not.”

A necessary question—“killed by their lovers’ hands” was the leading cause of death for pregnant women.

I read the words on the report, and all feeling left my face. “Oh crap.”

“Yeah. I’ll print pictures.”

I muttered, “Crap,” again.

He opened the door to the chamber. “Kinda changes things.”

“Yeah.”

“Again, I suggest you talk with her doctors,” he said. “You’ll probably need a warrant first.”

“I’ll do that now.”

“Let me know about that 911 call,” he said.

An administrative assistant let me nest at an available work space that boasted a wobbly chair and a broken ceiling light. As I sat, my phone vibrated.

A text, and then another text, from Syeeda.
Where are you? I officially have questions. Why haven’t u called me back???

I typed one word—
WORKING
—then shoved the phone into my bag.

In less than twenty minutes, I had received from Brooks autopsy photos for the murder book and had prepared warrant requests for Juliet Chatman’s medical records along with records for Chloe and Cody. I faxed those requests to Judge Keener for approval.

Minutes later, I slid back behind the wheel of the Crown Vic.

Had Juliet known about her condition?

Is that why she saw her doctor twice in less than a week?

If so, what had been her reaction?

And how had Christopher Chatman reacted?

The suitcases.

My stomach clenched as a horrid thought formed in my mind.

Had she poisoned Cody and Chloe because she knew…?

Or had the fire merely been a coincidence? God’s way—or the devil’s way—of finalizing her wish to die—and to die with her children.

THE MEDICAL OFFICE OF OBSTETRICIAN-GYNECOLOGIST MARIA KULKANIS WAS
located in the seaside town of Santa Monica, just a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean. I parked on the quiet tree-lined street in front of an Italian restaurant, a block away from the outdoor shops of the Third Street Promenade. The sun had slept in, leaving behind soupy gray skies.

Judge Keener had approved and faxed my search warrant requests while I was en route to Santa Monica. With the expandable case file tucked beneath my arm, I quickly stepped into the building and rode the elevator up to the third floor. A moment later, I entered an empty, softly lit waiting room that smelled of potpourri. The sound track to
Cats
whispered over the sound system.

I approached the reception desk and badged the Latina woman sitting there. “I’m here to talk with Dr. Kulkanis.”

“One minute,” she said, immediately picking up the phone.

I stepped away, feeling my fingers and toes thaw from the chill.

On one wall hung a poster of a smiling woman in soft focus, childless thanks to the long-sounding pill name she had been taking. On the other walls hung more posters of smiling women as they cradled bellies—swollen and healthy with a little help from Vita-Life and Estro-Natal.

Childless, pregnant—both versions made me sweat.
Technically
, by now, I was supposed to be one of those tummy-clutching mommas to be. Back in the spring, I had planned to go off the Pill—I was thirty-seven years old, my mother wanted grandkids, and I probably wanted her to have them. But women’s intuition had whispered in my ear, “
Gurl
. Keep poppin’ them pills. Shenanigans are afoot.”

Indeed, Greg had been diddling the Japanese skank.

I had immediately refilled my pill prescription, although not smiling as broadly (or at all) as the poster lady passively praising the wonders of that long-sounding contraceptive name.

But I forgave him. (
You took him back. Again, you took him back.
) That meant, in the near future, a baby could still happen.

Dr. Kulkanis was ready to talk to me, and I tripped down the hallway to a large office with a view of the Italian restaurant across the street. I sat across from the older white woman with fresh-scrubbed porcelain skin and a wild silver bob. No posters on these walls. Just Christmas and Hanukkah cards, framed diplomas, and pictures of babies, more babies, and babies with their parents. Even the mug near her hands had a picture of a baby on it.

After banter about her practice, I slipped the faxed court order on her desk.

“On Thursday, Juliet thought she was pregnant,” Dr. Kulkanis told me. “She didn’t seem happy with that. I’ve been her doctor for over twenty years, and so I know her.
Knew
her.” The doctor’s breath caught, and her blue eyes filled with tears. “She kept saying that she couldn’t be pregnant, that it was impossible. But she was experiencing drowsiness, lethargy, nausea. The muscles in her arms and legs hurt, and her last period came before Halloween.

“I asked her if she’d had sex with her husband, and the look of revulsion on her face…” The doctor shook her head. “One time: that’s what she told me. She’d had sex with him once since the summer. And I laughed and asked if she needed a refresher course on how pregnancies occurred.”

“She hadn’t been on birth control?”

“Seems like you may need one, too,” Dr. Kulkanis said. “Yes: Juliet had been on the Pill. Remember, though: there’s still a one percent chance that you can get pregnant.”

The sound of rushing blood filled my ears. Something (my ovaries) jabbed at my abdomen. Their way of saying, “Damn, Lou. Maybe you should take two pills a day, eh?”

“What about the Valium prescription?” I asked.

“I had prescribed five milligrams twice a day for her anxiety. But she told me she’d stopped taking them back in the summer, once she had started to feel drowsy and fatigued.”

“Dr. Brooks found excessive amounts of Valium in her blood,” I said.

The ob-gyn lifted the mug to her lips and sipped.

“And he found a lot of Valium in the children’s blood, too.”

I let my inference hang in the air as she sat the mug back on the desk.

“Juliet had been distressed,” Dr. Kulkanis said, “but she wasn’t suicidal. Nor was she
homicidal
. She’d never…” She swallowed, then met my gaze.

My body went cold as a “best of” list of murderous moms scrolled through my mind.

Susan Smith.

Andrea Yates.

Marybeth Tinning.

“Her visit on Thursday,” I said. “Anything strange about it?”

Dr. Kulkanis reached for a tissue box on the corner of her desk. “She, umm…” The doctor blew her nose into a sheet, then sighed. “She had lost seventeen pounds since her appointment back in May. Her blood pressure was low—ninety over fifty. I did a blood draw, which—in addition to the urine test—confirmed that she wasn’t pregnant.”

“Anything else happen on Thursday?” I whispered.

“I examined her and felt a large mass on her right ovary. I told her that it could’ve been a cyst—she’d had those before. So I performed an ultrasound.”

“To look at what you were feeling?”

“Correct. The most typical cysts are usually filled with fluid—she’d had those. But on this visit, the ultrasound didn’t show what it typically did. Instead, it showed a large mass on her ovary and black spots just like it all around her uterus.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“I told her that I was concerned and wanted better imaging to know what I was seeing, that the tissue could’ve been benign. Fibroids, for example.”

“And Juliet’s reaction?”

“Still had pregnancy on the brain. She kept saying, ‘I can’t have another baby. I don’t want another baby.’ And then she said—her exact words were—‘Another baby would
trap
me.’ ”

“Trap?”

The doctor nodded. “I scheduled a CT scan at another facility for first thing this past Monday morning, and then a follow-up appointment with me for Tuesday. Yesterday. Both of which she missed.”

I cocked my head. “Do you know
why
she missed them? She was alive on Monday.”

The woman shrugged. “She didn’t call—she just… didn’t show up.”

I wrote a note.
Why did she skip her appts?
What had been more important than those black spots growing inside her?

“When I sent her for imaging, I knew what our conversation would be, and I had planned to tell her in person during our appointment. Not knowing about the fire, I left her a message yesterday afternoon, when it was clear she wasn’t coming in. I asked her to call me and…” The doctor’s voice broke. “At the time, I didn’t know she had also missed the CT. I thought that today…”

I pulled out three autopsy pictures from the file: Juliet Chatman’s abdominal cavity was congested with cancerous tumors that resembled pieces of raw, fatty rump roast. “The medical examiner took tumor samples to analyze, but he thinks ovarian cancer.” I handed her the photos.

With a shaky hand, Dr. Kulkanis studied each picture twice, then whispered, “I agree.”

Ovarian cancer: a mean disease that will not tell you it had arrived until the hurt became too explosive to ignore. By that time, the cancer had grown past the ovary to contaminate other organs. Doctors throw surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation at the disease. Patients and their loved ones add prayer, lots of prayer. If you are blessed with an early diagnosis, you can make plans past five years: see your daughter married, watch your son march across a stage for his diploma, take that cruise to the Bahamas. Women with advanced disease, though, women like Juliet Chatman… Their families would experience those life moments without them.