Клэр Донелли - Last Licks

Sunny followed her host into the living room, where Toby lay whining under the coffee table, peering out at the pieces of a broken vase on the floor. Sunny decided it would probably be best for her to wait for Will outside, so she made a quick good-bye and left Helena to deal with the latest disaster.

When Will arrived, Sunny whistled at his outfit. He was all in black—Henley shirt, jeans, and a jean jacket.

“You look as though you should be riding a motorcycle,” she told him.

“Good,” he replied, “then I should fit in over at O’Dowd’s later.” Raising his sunglasses, he took in her outfit. “Which is more than I can say for you, missy.”

She made a face. “I’m going to change later. We can’t both go to Dr. Gavrik looking like we intend to beat the truth out of her.”

“So while I menace the good doctor, I suppose you can appeal to her softer side.”

“That’ll be like appealing to the softer side of a rock,” Sunny muttered as she climbed aboard.

As they started off to the north, Will asked, “So what did you learn about our new best friend Alfred? What are his vices? Women? Money? Sheep?”

“Well, it looks as though he had an experience that put him off women.” Sunny passed along the story that Mrs. Martinson told her.

“His uncle and his fiancée? Ouch. That makes for one tangled motive. Or two, if you count the money.” He frowned. “This is the problem with going solely on motive. You can pile it up until, on paper, you’ve got a prime suspect.”

“I detect a ‘but’ in the underbrush,” Sunny said.

Will nodded. “ But your case doesn’t hold together when you apply real-world considerations.”

“Like why would he wait ten years and then suddenly rush his uncle off the mortal coil?”

“Or if he had those ten years to plan a murder, he wouldn’t at least give himself an ironclad alibi.”

“For that matter, why would a guy as—well, ‘controlling’ is as good a word that comes to my mind—put himself in somebody else’s power by hiring them to kill Gardner?”

“I can see you’ve been thinking about this for a bit,” Will said.

“Guilty,” she admitted. “And there are always answers you can come up with. He’s arrogant, he’s conceited, he figures that whoever actually committed the murder for him is in too deep to talk about it . . .”

“You left out a favorite from TV detective shows,” Will put in. “Maybe he’s just crazy.” He sighed. “You can explain and explain until you build a Frankenstein’s monster of a theory like the one that Ollie Barnstable came up with against Stan Orton. But you’re supposed to apply Occam’s Razor.”

Sunny grinned. “Also known as KISS—‘Keep it simple, stupid!’ Start from the simplest causes, and keep to the least complex results.”

“Can we do that?” Will asked. “We have a nephew who stands to inherit and who hates his uncle for bad behavior. We also have an occupational therapist who hates the old geezer because he’s making her life a living hell. So they join forces . . .”

“Except that doesn’t jibe with Elsa’s take on Alfred,” Sunny objected. “She didn’t make a big deal out of it, but I’d say she really resented the fact that he didn’t try to help her. Somehow, I can’t see him coming to her and saying, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t rat out my uncle for abusing you, but here’s a better way. Let’s kill him.’”

“Based on opportunity, Elsa Hogue was working late at the facility and could have been the one giving something to Gardner—again assuming Ollie didn’t dream it,” Will offered. “Lord knows, she had motive.”

“She called Gardner a vile sort of person,” Sunny agreed. “And yet . . . here comes the real world again. Gardner had to know how she felt about him. Why would he accept anything from her in the middle of the night?”

“Maybe the great lover thought she’d finally come around.”

“With the accent on final?” Sunny shook her head. “I thought you didn’t like what-ifs and maybes.”

“I’m trying to float some theory of the crime.” Will drove in silence for a moment. “All right, based on opportunity, we do have one other outsider near Room 114 that night.”

“Luke Daconto.” For Sunny, this was a nonstarter. “You’ve got opportunity all right, but in terms of motive, there’s nothing. He was actually friendly with Gardner, and Gardner was a fan of his.”

“I could throw Alfred into the mix, offering money for Daconto to do the deed,” Will said quickly. “The guy must be having money problems. He’s playing at O’Dowd’s, for crying out loud.”

Sunny told Will about Luke’s commune upbringing. “He still makes his mom’s skin cream,” she finished. “With a hippy-dippy background like that, do you think he’d really be interested in Alfred’s money?”

“They say that whatever one generation wants, the next generation wants nothing to do with,” Will said. “The hippies rebelled against the suburban American dream. Maybe Daconto is rebelling against his mom and really wants lots of money. Maybe he only makes her lotion or whatever because he’s hoping he can sell the formula for a million dollars.”

“Brilliant theory, Ollie,” she told him.

Will subsided again as he drove along the country roads around Levett. “There’s one theory I’m really not happy to bring up. But now that we’re out of the folks who’d not normally be around the ward, we’ve got to look at the regular staff—and that jump in the death statistics at Bridgewater Hall. What if Gardner Scatterwell was just the latest in a series?”

Sunny stared. “You mean a serial killer?”

“An angel of death—that’s what the newspeople like to call killers who turn up in health care.”

“I think Frank Nesbit is going to love that theory,” Sunny told him. “An angel of death, operating right under his nose?”

“It might be a little . . . politically opportune,” Will admitted after a brief pause. “But I’m beginning to think it’s either that, or Gardner Scatterwell simply died of a stroke.”

“How do you figure to prove this?” Sunny wanted to know.

“We’ll have to ask Dr. Reese for patient records—and staff attendance for months, maybe years. Then we’ll have to see if the same names crop up around the patients who died.”

“That’s going to be a lot of paperwork,” Sunny had to point out. “And we’re coming up on our deadline.”

“Yeah,” Will replied. “Too bad we’ve got a date tonight.” The route they were traveling became a bit more complicated, and conversation halted as Will went into a series of turns, taking them through more built-up areas, then on a more countrified road again, and after about a quarter of a mile, he turned into what looked like a break in a wall of bushes, and they wound up in a parking lot.

”I didn’t think that places like this existed anymore,” Sunny said, taking in the building sprawling in front of them. It had probably started out as a lodge or log cabin but had grown, throwing out extensions. In his youth, Sunny’s dad would have called it a roadhouse. But there was no honky-tonk atmosphere inside. The lighting was subdued, the lunch crowd quiet, and the smell of food delicious.

“A couple of deputies from Levett took me here a few times,” Will whispered as they walked up to the hostess. “But I never felt comfortable here. Nesbit turned up too often.”

They mentioned Dr. Gavrik’s name and were quickly led to a booth in a quiet corner where the doctor was already sitting, her back to the wall, tight-lipped as ever, those piercing dark eyes glancing to her watch and then giving them a “time is money” look.