“So who in this long list of enemies was capable of killing Christine?”
“Oh, Cheryl Beth. How would I know that?”
“Because you know everything, Dr. Carpenter.”
“What, you’re a detective now?”
“Someone has to be. This cop, Dodds-I have a really bad feeling about him. He just looks at me like he thinks I did it, like I’m hiding something.”
“Are you?”
A shot of defensiveness stiffened her before he laughed.
“I’m serious, doctor. I feel like I need to do something, get him some information. And Stephanie, too. You should have seen how she went off on me.”
“The detective talked to me. I told him you couldn’t have done it.”
“See! He has it in his head that I killed her!”
“Cheryl Beth, this is a big old urban hospital. And we have all the problems of an urban hospital. Yesterday, I saw a guy in a stairwell, dressed in rags, just walking up and down the stairs. He said his dead mother was chasing him, and didn’t I see her? He was shaking and bawling. Scared the hell out of me. I called security, and it turned out he was just another street person who wandered in here for warmth. He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, off his meds, hearing voices. Good Lord.”
He stopped. Then, “Do you know how much of this hospital has been closed down the past decade? There are old, abandoned parts of this place that I’ve never even been to, that the security guards don’t even know about.”
“They’re probably all my old shortcuts,” she said.
“You know I studied here when I was a medical student? This was back in the Stone Age, when they had real wards, just long rows of beds separated by curtains. But it was great training. Young docs today, most of them don’t really know how to listen to heart sounds. They don’t get a chance. Hearts get fixed. People don’t get rheumatic fever. Back then, we’d get lots of public health cases, lots of people with heart murmurs. It was great to be a student. The old basement, that’s where the morgue was. It’s so isolated. Why they would put offices down there, much less even put a woman alone in an office there…?” He shook his head. “It was just a horrible, random act.”
That didn’t make her feel better. She said, “So what about the footprints in my flower bed?”
He smiled, half to himself, staring at the floor. At first Cheryl Beth thought he was patronizing her and she grew angry. Then he spoke in a different voice. “The irony of the whole thing is that Christine was quite the sexual predator. She had cheated on Gary for years, and not with just one person. She was hardly the victim, however much I am baffled by your taste in men. I’ll just leave it at that.”
