The Oath (31 page)

“So where do we go from here?” Hardy asked.

Glitsky had no doubt. “Kensing’s list. If there’s an angel of death at Portola, I want to know about it. Meanwhile, Marlene’s going ahead with the grand jury. I got another unpleasant surprise about five minutes before Strout called.” He told Hardy about Bracco’s discovery on the lack of security for the ICU at Portola.

“So anybody could have gone in? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Bracco seemed to think so.” Glitsky paused. “I don’t want to have two potential killers,” he said. “I really don’t. The idea offends me.”

“Me, too, but three’s worse,” Hardy reminded him.

“Three?”

“Whoever drove the car.”

Brendan Driscoll talked most of the afternoon to the grand jury. Obviously, he thought someone who hated him had testified before he did. The prosecutor, Ms. Ash, seemed poisoned against him from the outset. He had been planning to talk about Ross and Kensing and Kensing’s damned wife and the others who had made life so difficult at Parnassus.

Instead, she wanted to know all about his personal relationship with Tim, and this made him very nervous. He’d worked very hard to keep it all low-key—of course, they’d had their disagreements. When you worked so closely with one individual over a long period of time, there was bound to be some friction. But in general they had been an extremely good team.

But Ash had already heard about the warning memo he’d received from Tim, the personal dressing down he’d endured—Ross must have been the source for that, he thought—and had spent what seemed like a lot of time going over what he’d done at the hospital last Tuesday. Finally, before he could direct her to anyone else who’d had run-ins with Tim, she’d started asking questions about Mr. Markham’s correspondence, his own familiarity with it, especially the decision to bill the city for outpatient services.

She was clueless, he thought. He’d rather have her looking at other people than at this business decision, which, so far as Driscoll could tell, had nothing to do with anything except the company’s cash flow. But if it distracted her from his own personal issues with Tim, especially during this difficult last month, he supposed he should be happy. He would have preferred to direct her attention to one of his pet enemies, and he tried a couple of times.

“…the outpatient billing decision was really Mr. Markham’s to make, and he was dead set against it. But Dr. Ross…”

“…although during the time you’re asking about, Mr. Markham wasn’t able to concentrate on his work the way he liked to because Dr. Eric Kensing’s wife, Ann, was demanding so much of…”

When he couldn’t get Ash to bite, he finally decided he had to leave it.

But Jeff Elliot was a different story. Driscoll had already called the reporter yesterday and made an appointment to talk to him after he was finished with the grand jury. When he got out—quite a bit more shaken than he’d expected to be—he walked to the
Chronicle
’s building, where Elliot was waiting for him.

Now he had a cup of coffee and had finally gotten comfortable on a chair in the little cubicle. He knew who he wanted to vilify, and had printed out Markham’s letters both to Kensing and to Ross, as well as over a hundred memos to file. These outlined Tim’s ongoing dissatisfaction with both of them on a variety of points. Driscoll was making his pitch that these documents supplied a number of very plausible motives for someone to have killed Tim.

Elliot flipped through the pages without much enthusiasm. “This is good stuff, Brendan, except that it looks like we’ve got a whole different ball game over there now.”

Driscoll straightened himself in the chair. Touching the knot of his tie, he cleared his throat. “What do you mean by that? Over where?”

“Portola. It appears that a lady who died there a few months ago was also poisoned. From what I’m hearing, there may be several more.” He filled Driscoll in on most of what he’d learned to that point. “So needless to say, this casts some doubt over whether Mr. Markham was killed for personal reasons. He might have been just the latest in a series of these drug deaths at Portola, in which case the motives anybody might have had to kill him would be pretty irrelevant. Don’t you agree?”

“That makes sense, I guess.” Driscoll was sitting back in a kind of shock. For three days, he’d been plotting his revenge on Kensing for all the trouble he’d caused, on Ross for firing him. He thought he’d planned perfectly. Certainly he had a great deal of evidence against both of them. If Elliot would go public with any of it, it might force the board and maybe even the police to act.

But he hadn’t been able to get his accusations aired either in front of the grand jury or now, here. It wasn’t fair. “So what’s going to happen now?” he asked. “Don’t you want any of this?”

“Of course. This is great stuff.” Elliot certainly wasn’t faking his enthusiasm. “I just wanted to be straight with you that I might not get to it real soon. But hey, cheer up. Parnassus is going to be news for the rest of the year.” The reporter patted the stack of paper. “This will be good bedtime reading.”

Brendan had one last question. “So these other deaths at Portola? Do they mean that the police no longer think Eric Kensing might have killed Tim?”

“I think if nothing else it’s going to give him a reprieve. Why?”

Driscoll shook his head. “I don’t really know. I think I’d just come to believe that he had actually done it. Certainly he had more reason than anybody else. I guess I’ll just have to adjust.”

Vincent’s Little League team, the Tigers, practiced only a few hundred yards from Hardy’s house. They’d gotten permission to set up a backstop in an otherwise deserted section of Lincoln Park Golf Course, up against Clement Street. Hardy couldn’t commit the time to be the team’s manager, but he tried to show up as often as he could and help coach. He’d played ball through high school and his son’s love for the game was a source of satisfaction in his own life.

He got back from Colma in time to pitch batting practice. There was no fog here twenty blocks inland. When the team broke down for infield practice, Hardy came off the field and stood next to Abe, who had been watching from behind the backstop. Mitch, the manager, laced one down the third-base line where Vincent snagged it backhand and threw a strike to first. Abe nodded in appreciation. “Your boy’s looking pretty good.”

Glitsky had called home and told his family to meet him for a barbecue at the Hardys’. So after practice, they stopped in at the Safeway and bought tri-tip steaks and some kind of gourmet sausage, prepackaged potato and Caesar salads, sodas, and a six-pack of beer. Vincent pulled a half gallon of cookie dough ice cream out of the freezer. Glitsky held four flavors of bottled iced tea in two four-packs.

Hardy stood behind Glitsky and his son and watched as they loaded their goods onto the conveyor belt. It struck him that Louis XIV—the Sun King himself—probably didn’t have this kind of food selection, this kind of weather, that in fact he was living in a kind of golden age and he’d be a fool to forget it. If it sometimes threatened to break his heart, it was a good thing.

He put a hand on Glitsky’s shoulder, one on his son’s.

“Rebecca Simms? This is Dismas Hardy again.”

He thought he heard an intake of breath. Nurse Simms had been straightforward enough last time about not wanting to hear from him again, not wanting any more involvement. He rushed ahead before she could cut him off or hang up. “I know it’s a little late, but I thought I owed you a phone call. Have you seen the news on TV?”

“No,” she said. “I try not to watch too much TV. I read instead. What news?”

J
ackman got the word out that he wanted them all in his office before eight o’clock the next morning. What the DA wanted, the DA got. Dead silent, Bracco and Fisk stood against the open door. Wes Farrell and Hardy sat on either end of the couch drinking coffee, while Glitsky was in the outer office with his wife. At a couple of minutes after the hour, Jackman arrived, accompanied by Marlene Ash and John Strout. After greeting everyone cordially, the DA went behind his desk, sat, and gave a sign to Treya. She ushered Glitsky inside and closed the door after him.

Jackman wasted no time on preliminaries. “Diz,” he began, “I hear you’ve got ten more names on this magic list of yours. You’ll be giving that to Abe, I presume.”

“Yes, sir. Already done. Copies to Dr. Strout. And I spoke to another potential witness last night—a nurse at Portola—who’s going to talk to the people she works with. Dr. Kensing only began his list about six months ago. My nurse witness might have more names.”

“And that doesn’t include what comes out of the woodwork,” Marlene Ash put in. “I’ve got a feeling that everybody who died at Portola is going to seem fishy to somebody.”

Jackman nodded in agreement, but he’d considered this.

“That’s why I’m asking Dr. Strout here to have one of his assistants review what I expect is going to be a flood of requests for exhumations and autopsies. At least that way we’ll make sure some doctor might have thought something was wrong about a premature death before we go ahead.”

“Good luck with that,” Farrell said. “You’re talking about these folks overruling the PM their own hospital conducted. You’re not going to get a lot of cooperation from doctors who work there. And the administration’s going to be worse.”

“They’ll have to if we order it.”

“Sure,” Farrell said, “but we can’t make doctors and nurses voice suspicions if they don’t want to. Or don’t have them.”

Jackman wasn’t worried about it. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want a lot of these requests.”

“But we’re going to get them, from families if no one else.” Ash looked around the room. “We’d better be ready.”

“All right.” Jackman was ready to move on. “John, why don’t you give us a little rundown of your results yesterday, although I think we’ve all gotten the basic message.”

The medical examiner laid it all out for them. Mrs. Loring had been killed by an overdose of Pavulon and succinylcholine chloride. They were two muscle relaxants that, especially in the case of someone who is already comatose, might mimic a natural death.

“No might about it,” Farrell interrupted. “Nobody thought a thing about it until Diz gave me her name and told me I’d be smart to look. I was even planning to sue the hospital over negligent care and didn’t have any suspicion she’d been murdered.”

Strout went on with his explanation. These drugs were extremely powerful, and always administered in IVs. Beyond that, since Mrs. Loring had been bedridden in the ICU, there was no real possibility that she’d taken pills orally in an effort to end her own life. She wouldn’t have had access to them. The conclusion was that Strout was calling this homicide “death at the hands of another.” In other words, some degree of murder.

“But no potassium?” Glitsky wanted that nailed down.

“Not any. No.”

A silence settled in the room, and Jackman broke it. “It seems to me that the salient point here is not so much the type of drugs that may have been used in these two deaths. And I don’t want to speculate ahead of the facts on potential future discoveries we might make. But more than the difference in drugs, the common feature of these two homicides is that somebody seemed to know, or believe, that Portola rubber-stamped their postmortems, when they were done at all, especially in the more obvious cases.”

“I checked into that a bit,” Strout volunteered. “Seems the cutbacks they’ve been livin’ with have left them very short in this area. Hospital PMs, as a rule, aren’t very thorough anyway. These guys were barely goin’ through the motions. They don’t even have a forensics specialist on staff anymore. Instead, they run only basic scans out to their lab—”

“If they even take it that far,” Farrell said.

Strout bobbed his head. “I would agree that it might not always happen.”

“So what are the standard scans, John?” Hardy asked.

“It can vary,” Strout said, “but basically we’re talkin’ money and levels of complexity. You’ve got your A-scan, which is set for alcohol and some of your common drugs—aspirin, cocaine, and so on. Generally, you find a cause or possible cause of death at one level—say you’ve got toxic levels of cocaethylene, which is cocaine and alcohol, at the A-scan—then you stop looking. But if you want to keep goin’, the B-scan’s set for a slew of other drugs. Anyway, each level of scan gets more expensive. So if you got a cause of death at the zero-scan level, most folks stop there.”

“And that’s what you think happened here, with Mrs. Loring?” Jackman asked.

Strout nodded genially. “That’s my best guess. Nobody looked too hard. They looked at all, somebody would’a seen ’em.”

“Once you got a cause of death, did you stop, too, John?” Marlene asked him. “Or did you take it beyond there?”

“Yes, ma’am, I sure did. She had her chemo agent and some morphine for the pain. I got her records when I called for the body, and she was self-medicatin’ with morphine in the hospital. But nowhere near a fatal dose of anythin’ else.”

“But if she was self-medicating,” Farrell asked, “that means she was fairly coherent, doesn’t it?”

“It could,” Strout agreed. “She knew when she was hurtin’, and when it got bad enough, she hit the button for a dose of morphine.”

“Which is premeasured, am I right, John?” Ash asked him. “And time-release controlled?”

“Right. No way she overdoses herself, if that’s what you’re sayin’.”

“So she wasn’t in any kind of coma?” Hardy had for some reason imagined she was. Somehow the fact of her consciousness made her death all the worse. “You’re telling us she was alert and somebody just came in and killed her?”

“I don’t know ’bout that, Diz. She might’a been sleepin’ at the exact time. But otherwise, in terms of was she in a conscious state? I’d have to say pretty much yeah.”

Everyone seemed lost in private thoughts. The DA simply moved his head up and down, up and down. Finally, he stopped. “Mr. Farrell, I want to thank you for coming to this early call. I expect we’ll be hearing from you in the near future. I appreciate your cooperation.”

It took Farrell a moment to realize that Jackman was telling him to leave. When it clicked in, he was gracious about it, thanking the DA for thinking to invite him, then Strout for his efforts and Hardy again for his.

Strout spoke up, as well. “If you don’t need me, Clarence, I got a feelin’ I’m lookin’ at a busy day, and I’d best get on with it.”

After the two men left, Jackman stood and came around the front of his desk, then boosted himself up onto it. “Diz, we’re sharing information with you on Markham and you’re the man responsible for bringing Mrs. Loring to the attention to all of us. We’re grateful to you. But we still expect your client to testify fully before the grand jury. Especially in light of this list he provided for us, which opens its own can of worms.” He looked around to Ash and Glitsky, to the two inspectors by the back wall. “If anybody wants Mr. Hardy to step outside, I’m sure he’ll understand.”

But nobody said a word. Jackman gave it another few seconds, then turned to Glitsky. “All right, Abe, we all know that this throws some kind of a wrench into Markham. How do you propose we proceed?”

When Hardy came in, David Freeman looked up from the no doubt brilliant brief he was writing longhand on his yellow legal pad. “Ah, Mr. Hardy,” he said with pleasure. “Come in, come in.” He had half of an unlit cigar in his mouth. The top button of his shirt was undone, his tie so loose it was barely attached. Hardy thought it might have been the same tie he’d been wearing yesterday, the same shirt. The shutters were still partway drawn, although it was by now well into the workday. Had Freeman slept here in the office? It wouldn’t be the first time, but he decided he wouldn’t ask. All in all, he’d rather not know.

“You wanted to see me? If it’s about the rent, I’m not paying any more and that’s final. In fact, I already pay too much.”

Freeman harrumphed. “This Portola woman is your doing, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps.”

“Which makes you either the unluckiest son of a bitch on the planet, or the dumbest. I’d be curious to know your thoughts when you asked Strout to dig up this poor woman’s bones.”

“How’d you know it was me? And in actual fact, it wasn’t. It was Wes Farrell, although I admit I played a role.”

“That charade yesterday at lunch, which perhaps in all the excitement you’ve forgotten. John Strout mentioned both Mr. Farrell and Mrs. Loring by name, and I happened to notice them again in the newspaper this morning. Front page, if I’m not mistaken.”

“And Jeff Elliot’s byline, now that I think of it. I’ve got to call him and have him buy me lunch or something.”

Freeman sat back, took him in. “You’re not taking this seriously.”

Hardy took an upholstered chair and moved it into Freeman’s line of sight, then sat in it. “Yes I am. And with all due respect to your gray hairs, it’s neither unlucky nor dumb. I checked to make sure my client was long gone when Mrs. Loring died. He couldn’t have killed her.”

“No, maybe not her. But maybe she’s got nothing to do with Markham.”

“Technically true, but not relevant. She’s got everything to do with him.”

“What, pray? As I understand it, and even Mr. Elliot’s article made it quite clear, your Mrs. Loring died of a different overdose, from an entirely different drug, than Mr. Markham. That in itself points to a different hand.
Res ipsa loquitur, n’est-ce pas?
Can it be you don’t see this?”

Hardy was getting a bad feeling about Freeman’s direction, but he had to admire somebody who could string English, Latin, and French together so fluidly and without apparent forethought. It was something you didn’t hear every day. So Hardy had half a grin on when he replied. “Sure, David, I see it. I just don’t see the problem.”

Freeman came forward, arms and elbows on his desk. He took his cigar from his mouth. “The problem is that it neither proves nor disproves anything about your client in regard to Mr. Markham, and you’re pretending that it does. When in fact all it does is bring more pressure to bear on Mr. Jackman to bring an indictment on at least somebody at Portola, and the closest person to hand might in fact turn out to be Dr. Kensing.”

Hardy shook his head. “As it turns out, I was just with Clarence. He’s not thinking that way at all.”

“He will. Give him time.”

“I don’t think so. He’s going to be looking for the person who killed Mrs. Loring, and maybe several other patients at Portola. He’s then going to assume that that person killed Markham, as well.”

“And why will he do that?”

“Jesus, David. Because it makes sense. Doesn’t it just stretch your credibility a little too much to believe that two separate murderers are prowling the halls at Portola?”

Hanging his head, Freeman sighed. “Didn’t O.J.’s slow car chase stretch credibility? Didn’t Monica’s blue dress turning up unwashed stretch credibility? Or the Florida recount—two hundred–some votes out of sixty million. Trust me, Diz, people nowadays are used to a boundless elasticity of credibility. And what I see is that you’re sorely tempted to think you’ve won already, you’ve gotten Kensing off. I’m telling you that that’s not the case. All you’ve done here is put the magnifying glass on everybody at Portola, and that includes him. You can’t ignore that, and from what I’m hearing, that’s what you were intending to do.”

Hardy glared at the old man. “So what’s your suggestion?”

Freeman was glad to give it. “The heat is way up now, Diz. They’re going to have to put handcuffs on somebody for something soon, or there’s going to be a peasant revolt. They’re entirely likely to do your client for Markham, then kind of hint he’s good for most, if not all, of the rest, but they just can’t prove it.” His eyes glinted under the steel wool brows. “You may have given Kensing a defense at trial, but now it’s a hell of a lot more likely that he’s going to have one.”

In fact, Hardy had concluded that Kensing’s troubles were pretty much over. In the euphoria of guessing right on Mrs. Loring, then of Glitsky’s conversion, he conceded now that he might have gotten carried away with some of the implications of the autopsy’s results. Freeman was reminding him that his client was still exposed and vulnerable, and now maybe more than ever. Hardy had better remain vigilant until the whole drama had played out.

“Let me ask you this,” the old man said, “what if one of the new batch of autopsies shows potassium again? You think that helps your client?”

“David, he wasn’t there for Mrs. Loring. Get it? If he didn’t kill her, he didn’t kill any of them.”

“Not true. Pure wishful thinking. And now you’re getting angry, as well you should when you see your logic breaking down. But don’t take it out on me.” He picked up his cigar and chewed at it thoughtfully. “Listen, I don’t want to rain on your parade, I really don’t. I admit you’ve opened a door here and it might lead where you want to go. I hope it does. I hope it’s one serial killer who confesses to it all before sundown.

“But think about this. Who supplied the names of the dead people? Kensing. If he was so suspicious so many times, why then didn’t he mention some of this sooner? Why did he wait until he was a suspect in Mr. Markham’s death? Isn’t that a little convenient? And isn’t it possible he could have been in collusion with someone else at Portola, maybe one of the nurses, so he needn’t have been physically around for every death? You’re laughing, but none of these are frivolous questions. Have you considered the possibility that Kensing and one or more of the nurses could have been getting bonuses under the table from Parnassus for clearing the beds of terminally ill long-term patients without adequate insurance? This kind of thing has been known to happen, especially in cash-strapped organizations.” He slowed down for a minute, sat back in his chair, and drummed the desktop with his fingers. “I’m not saying any of this is even remotely likely, Diz. But I am concerned. And you should be, too.”