John Lescroart - The Oath

"Who? That singer?"

"No. Regis."

"Regis?"

"Diz, please." Strout didn't believe that Hardy didn't recognize the most ubiquitous face in America. "You ever watch that Millionaire show? That's him. You notice the ties I been wearin' this last year? The guy invented a whole line of 'em. My wife tells me I look ten years younger."

"I knew there was something," Hardy said.

"And you know why else I love him? You ever notice how happy he is?"

"Not really, no. I can't say I see too much of Regis myself."

Strout clucked. "You're missin' out." He sighed, then picked up a stiletto from his desk, pushed the button, and clicked the narrow steel blade out into its place. "Now what brings you back here so soon? And I'm hopin' it's not another request like the last couple."

"The last couple got you one headline and a quick thousand dollars."

Strout was cleaning his fingernails with the knife. "Truth of the matter is I been wrastlin' with the idea of givin' you back your money since it turns out you was pretty close to right. That was work worth doin'. After Loring, nobody's gonna call me for doin' the first one-Mr. Lector, I mean."

"Well, you do what you want, John. If you want to give me back the money, I'd take it. But you won it fair and square. While you're deciding, maybe we could talk a minute about Carla Markham."

Strout didn't answer right away. Instead, he closed the knife up, clicked it open again. Closed it, clicked it open. "I was kind of wonderin' when you'd want to talk about her."

"Are you saying there's a reason I should have?"

"No. I'm not necessarily sayin' anything. I ruled on it clear enough, comin' down on murder/suicide equivocal."

"But something about it makes you uneasy?"

Strout nodded. "A lot about it makes me uneasy. You get a copy of my report, is that it?"

Hardy nodded. He'd read it for the first time on Sunday night, then again at the office yesterday. It had become a habit for him to read and reread witness testimony and reports, where the truth often lay buried beneath mounds of minutiae. "I noticed the gun was fired from below and behind the right ear, going forward."

"That's correct." Strout closed the stiletto again, then stood up and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that lined his left-hand wall. He boosted a haunch onto the thin counter, pulled an old six-shooter off the first shelf, and spun the cylinder. "I've seen it before."

"How often?"

Strout spun the cylinder again. "Maybe twice."

"In your thirty-year career?"

A nod. "About that. Maybe three times."

Hardy took that in. "So I take it Mrs. Markham was right-handed?"

"Nope. That ain't right, either." Except for an unconscious rocking of a leg, the coroner finally went still. "Plus, you know she'd bit the back of her front lower lip."

"I saw that. Did somebody have a hand over her mouth?"

"Comin' up behind her, you mean? Possible, but by no means conclusive. Just as likely she bit her lip."

Hardy sat a moment. He stared without focus in the direction of the venetian blinds behind Strout's desk. Dust motes hung in the striped shafts of sunlight. The cylinder spun a few more times. Eventually, he looked up. "So why'd suicide even get mentioned?"

"She had GSR"-gunshot residue-"on her right hand. And I know, I know what you're going to say." Strout held up his hand. "Doesn't prove she fired the gun. The shot that killed her could have put her in the gunshot environment. And you're a hundred percent right. But there's the gun by her hand…" Strout wound down, met Hardy's eyes. "I didn't have any forensic reason to rule it out, Diz."

"So somebody might have done a decent job of making it look like a suicide?"

"That's within the realm of the possible, Diz. It surely is. But let me ask you a question. Why do you want her to be murdered?"

"I guess because it's the only place left."

"Except your list, you mean."

Hardy shook his head. "As Mr. Freeman points out, there's no definite correlation between anybody on that list and who killed Tim Markham. But if Carla was killed, I'm betting it had to be the same person who killed her husband."

"But wasn't your client the last one at her house before…?" Strout let that hang.

Hardy sighed. "The theory's not perfect yet, John. I'm working on it.

Armed with their search warrant, Bracco and Fisk approached Donna, the records clerk at Portola. She was about thirty years old, slightly overweight, edgy at first when she found out they were policemen. She wore a small ring in her purple lips and another through her right eyebrow. It was obvious to Fisk that Bracco wasn't going to be comfortable talking to her, so he took point. Somehow, within minutes, they were all friends. She was competent at her job and pulled up and printed out all the Portola personnel and patient records for the relevant days within about a half hour.

After another half hour in one of the conference rooms, they pretty much had what they thought Glitsky wanted. As it turned out, the ICU nurses did rotate on a fairly regular schedule, although throughout the hospital there were more of them than the two inspectors had first been led to believe. In all, on the ten shifts when Kensing's list implied that patients might have died prematurely, nine nurses had spent some time in the intensive care unit. Only two, however, had been on duty for every death shift-Patricia Daly and Rajan Bhutan.

"Except we don't know for sure yet that any of those ten were homicides, do we?" Bracco asked. "All we know is Loring and Markham."

"But we do know Daly wasn't around for Markham, don't we?" Fisk replied. "Although Bhutan was. His partner that shift was-what's her name?"

She was one of the other seven regular ICU nurses, and Bracco had it at his fingertips. "Connie Rowe."

"I don't know how you remember a detail like that. I recognize the name when I hear it but I can't pull it up for the life of me."

"That's all right, Harlen. That's why they put us together. There's stuff you're good at that I'd never think about. Like Donna, for example, just now. Or looking for Loring's shift, which I had completely blown off."

Fisk, warmed by the praise, stood up and stretched. "What's another half hour when we're having this much fun?"

They both walked out to records-by now they were old friends with Donna-and told her there was a last shift they had to check. Bracco the detail man remembered the date: November 12. Marjorie Loring had breathed her last during the swing shift, between 4:00 P.M. and midnight.

Donna's fingers flew over the keyboard; then she looked up at them. "That's weird," she said. "I think every shift you've looked at, there's been this name R. Bhutan, and it's here, too. Are you guys looking specifically for somebody?"

"No, but he just keeps turning up, doesn't he?"

The young woman clicked her black fingernails on the countertop. "What is it about these dates, anyway? Can you tell me?"

Fisk leaned over and theatrically looked both ways, up and down the length of the room. "We could," he said and added the old chestnut, "but then we'd have to kill you."

Donna's eyes grew into saucers for a second; then she giggled and punched the key to print a hard copy of the record. Fisk took the sheet and glanced at it. Connie Rowe again, he noticed, not Patricia Daly. With a meaningful glance, he showed it to his partner, then turned back to the clerk. "Let me ask you something, Donna, if I may. Is there any record of the doctors who came and went during these same shifts that we've been looking at?"

She thought for a moment. "Well, the individual patients would have had their own doctors making rounds. Is that what you mean?"

"Not exactly. I mean all the doctors who had reason to go into the ICU on those days, for whatever reason."