John Sandford - Secret Prey

The woman bent over the screen, read the report, and said, "She would now. That’s definitely way high. But back then, the drugs weren’t so good. You’d have to talk to somebody older, who’d remember. But back then, she might not have been."

"All right: then look at this. On her second visit, they do some tests. But the tests never show up in the records."

The woman bent over the screen again, skimming through the records: "You know what?" she said finally. "It looks like she died before the tests could get back. So when they got back, they probably just tossed them."

"Huh. And the body was sent directly out to a funeral home."

"Yup."

"Why wouldn’t they do an autopsy?"

"Again, they didn’t do them so often back then. Not for hospital deaths. And, uh, you’d have to keep this under your hat… or at least not say I told you. I’ve noticed this in other records…"

"Sure."

"You see this funeral home?" She tapped the screen. "The predecessor organization to this hospital, which was called Dakota Mothers of Mercy, had a deal with the funeral home. If the relatives didn’t express a preference, they’d send the bodies out to this place, and the hospital would get a… consideration."

"A kickback."

"An emolument. If they sent them into Hennepin, for an autopsy, the body was up for grabs."

"So there would be a bias against autopsies," Lucas said.

"Unnecessary autopsies."

"You shoulda been a lawyer," Lucas said.

"Not enough money in it." The woman tapped the screen: "Here’s something else for you. The insurance company called about it. That’s the code for Prudential."

"They called?"

"Yup. That’s what that is-the files were sent out in response to a request from Prudential."

"They send them out to Prudential, but they’re gonna make me get a subpoena?"

"This was a long time ago," the woman said. "Things were really different."

The woman went back to the novel while Lucas made notes. When he was finished, he shut down the screen and gave her the fiche. "Thank you very much," he said.

She looked up from the desk. "Do you think if I, like, xeroxed my breasts and sent a copy to Hiaasen with my phone number, he’d call me up?"

"Certainly worth a try," Lucas said. "In fact, I’d recommend that you do it. How else will you know? If you don’t, you could be like two ships passing in the dark."

"Cops are weird," she said. But as Lucas left, she was looking at the copying machine.

Lucas drove toward home, thinking it all over: he’d call Prudential in the morning, hoping that they’d still have a record of the call. In any case, they must have paid somebody some money, if they bothered to make the call. He’d bet that Audrey was the recipient.

As he crossed the Mendota Bridge, he noticed, for the second or third time, that there was no noise in the background of his brain: no chattering. He’d caught himself whistling again. In the last twenty-four hours, he’d gotten thoroughly laid, hugged by Helen Bell, and double entendred by a nice-looking medical student.

"Glacier’s breaking up," he said aloud. "Ice is going out."

He wasn’t sure what it meant, but it felt right.

Sherrill saw him walking in, came down to meet him, took his hand. "Can I take you to dinner tomorrow night?"

"Sure. But things are starting to cook with Audrey McDonald. Shouldn’t mess us up, but if something comes up…" He was fumbling with his keys, opened the office door. She stepped in behind him.

"Tell me about it," she said. "About Audrey." He told her, and she said, "Goddamnit. If we weren’t sleeping together, you could just come down and tell Frank that you need me to work on this, and I’d get another neat case to work on. Now, we’d sorta have to jump through our asses."

"Nothing happening yet, anyway," he said.

"Well, if you’re going out to shoot somebody, call me," she said, as she went out the door.

"Do that."

Three calls: to Prudential, to the doctor who signed the death certificate, and to the funeral home that handled Amelia Lamb’s body.

Prudential was cooperative, but the right guy would have to get back.

The doctor was cooperative, but had no memory of the event at all. "I was doing a surgical residency and working part-time as an emergency room doc," he said. "I worked emergency rooms for seven years and must’ve signed five hundred of those things. Maybe a thousand. I’m sorry, but I just don’t remember."

The funeral home was confused, but a woman with a quavery, elderly voice finally found the record: Amelia Lamb had been cremated.

"Shit," Lucas said aloud.

"I beg your pardon?"

The Prudential guy called back a half hour later, as Lucas was pulling together records on the murders proposed by Helen Bell, as well as the two proposed by Annette Ingall.

"We paid sixty-four hundred dollars on George Lamb, which was not an inconsiderable sum at the time; and then four and a half years later, we paid fifteen thousand on Amelia Lamb. That insurance policy had been in effect only three years, which was probably why we called the hospital on it," the Prudential man said.

"Who was beneficiary on the Amelia Lamb policy?"

"Uh, let’s see… this is an older form… Um, an Audrey Lamb. Apparently her daughter."

"Not Audrey and Helen?"

"No, just an Audrey."

"How about on George Lamb?"

"That was… Amelia."

"Huh. Did Amelia Lamb have to take a physical?"

"Um… yup. Passed okay."

"Anything about high blood pressure?"

"Nope. But this form isn’t specific-you’d have to see the original doctor’s report, and that was so long ago…"

"Do you have the doc’s name?"

"Yup."

But the doctor was dead. His son, a dentist, said his father’s records had been transferred to other doctors when he gave up his practice, and records not transferred had been stored for ten years, then destroyed.

"Shit."

"I beg your pardon?"

Lucas went back to the records for an hour, and finally came to a push-comes-to-shove point. If Audrey was guilty of all of this, then she must have killed O’Dell. But according to the investigative records, signed off by Franklin and Sloan, she left the building before O’Dell was killed. That was confirmed: she logged out of the building at 10:53. Two people visiting their son in the building, who had logged out after her, confirmed that they had left just as a Roseanne rerun was ending. Nightline ended a couple of minutes before eleven, and they were shown as logging out at eleven, while O’Dell was confirmed killed at 11:02.

It was possible, of course, that Audrey was a master burglar and that she had some way of getting into a building with a security desk in the lobby. Or that she had somehow obtained a key card for the elevator. But the first of those possibilities seemed laughable, while the second was only barely reasonable-she wouldn’t have had much time to plan the killing of O’Dell, unless the killing was part of a long-range plan.

He thought about that for a moment. Maybe she did have a long-range plan. Maybe she had access to everybody she might ever need to kill. Then he shook his head. Couldn’t think that way. If she was working off a long-range plan, which had somehow involved getting home keys for all her possible victims, then she was a perfect killer and they were out of luck.

He glanced at his watch, punched up his computer, and wrote a memo, with copies to Frank Lester, head of the investigative division, and Rose Marie Roux.

Halfway through, a sheriff’s deputy called from Itasca County. "You called yesterday about the Baird case?"

"Yeah, thanks for calling back," Lucas said. "How well do you know the case?"