Patterson, James - Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 118

SOMETIMES A BAD WIND BLOWS.

A security guard accompanied me to Dr. Dennis Garza’s office on the ground floor, just around the corner from the ER.

An aggressively thin woman with penciled-on eyebrows and long fuchsia talons stood outside Garza’s office, calmly using the fax machine at her desk.

Trying like hell to control my breathing and my nerves, I showed her my badge and asked to see the doctor.

“Dr. Garza was here earlier, but he’s gone out for a while,” she said, dropping her eyes to the gun inside my shoulder holster. “He’s probably at home. Should I call him?”

I handed her papers. “I have a warrant to search his office. I need his keys.”

The woman gave me a sidelong look as she unlocked Garza’s office and snapped on the flickering overhead light. She walked to a credenza against the back wall, opened an antique-looking silver cigarette box on its surface.

The box was empty.

“He always keeps the file keys here,” she said. “They’re gone. That’s very strange.”

I told the security guard to break the locks with his crowbar, and I began to methodically trash the place.

The file cabinets held patient files and medical journals still in their glassine wrappers. I flipped through hundreds of files, graphs, and memos, looking for anything that would trigger a thought or an action, anything that would give me a clue.

Nothing did.

I jerked out the top drawer of Garza’s desk, sending pens and paper clips spilling onto the carpet. I pawed through the tangle of office supplies, hoping for brass buttons, a piece of jewelry, or a hospital ID bracelet, any souvenirs or trophies a serial killer might keep of his victims.

It was all strictly Office Depot.

An overnighter hung behind the door.

I yanked the zipper down, tossed the contents: a blue sports jacket, size 42 long; gray pants; black Coach belt; two button-down shirts, one pink, one blue; underwear; a leather tie holder. I found and unzipped a small black case — a diabetes test kit complete with syringes and bottles of insulin.

Garza was a diabetic.

His toiletry kit was filled with the normal stuff — toothpaste, razor, mouthwash, some sample packets of a soporific, an acid reducer, pills for erectile dysfunction.

Why the overnighter?

Fresh clothing for his court appearance?

Stuff to wear after spending the night with his girlfriend?

Either way, this was not evidence of murder.

I was digging into the corners of the bag and inside the zipper pockets, panting with frustration, when my Nextel rang.

“I’m down in the nurses’ locker room,” Jacobi said, pausing to cough, then saying words that made me want to name my firstborn Warren.

“Get down here, Boxer. I’ve got a suspect under arrest on suspicion of murder.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 119

A SUSPECT UNDER ARREST? I felt as if maybe all our hard work and risk-taking had finally paid off. Now, who was this monster?

A shifting crowd of nurses and aides were bunched against the far wall of the basement locker room. Some were squawking about their civil rights; others jeered at the cops as they used bolt cutters on the locks of unclaimed lockers.

Jacobi, bulky and scowling, looked more like muscle than he did a cop. He stood beside a dark-skinned woman in blue scrubs, sitting on a bench between the banks of lockers. Her arms were cuffed behind her back. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her before.

She was in her forties, with a plain, unlined oval face and short, straightened hair. A gold charm of a praying angel dangled from a chain around her neck.

She lowered her head and whimpered softly as I approached. Did she know who I was? Was this our killer?

“I asked this lady if she’d come down to the Hall to answer a few questions. She made a break for the door,” Jacobi said.

Then he showed me a small plastic box half-filled with caduceus buttons. I took the box and stared into the glinting brass pool. How could anything so harmless-looking have such murderous implications?

I allowed myself a small but triumphant smile as I looked at Jacobi.

“These were on the top shelf of this lady’s locker, Lieutenant,” he said. “I sent Conklin and Samuels back to the Hall for a warrant to search her apartment.”

“What’s your name?” I asked the woman.

“Marie St. Germaine.” She had a hint of an accent. West Indian, I thought.

The tag hanging from the chain around her neck identified her as a CNA, a certified nurse’s assistant. That meant that her job took her from floor to floor, giving her the opportunity to get into patients’ rooms.

And she’d have the means to medicate them.

Had this woman killed nearly three dozen patients? Maybe even more than that?

“Did Inspector Jacobi read you your rights?”

“Yeah, I did. But now that you’re here, I’ll do it again,” Jacobi said, his time-roughened face a few inches from hers.

“You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. You understand your rights?”

“You leave that girl alone,” someone shouted from the back of the room. “She did nothing. Let her go.”

A group of nurse’s aides picked up the chant. “Let her go, let her go.”

“That’s enough,” I yelled, slamming a locker door with the side of my fist. The chanting cooled to a low rumble.

“Do you understand your rights?” said Jacobi again.

“Yes. I do.”

“Why’d you run, Marie?”

“I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“The police,” she said.

I was already thinking how the DA’s office was so overwhelmed with their ever-expanding case load; they’d tell us to kick this suspect unless we had enough on her to convict.

“Find anything besides those buttons?” I asked Jacobi.

“This is all hers,” he said, pointing to a pile of humble clothes and toiletries on the bench. The most lethal object in the pile was a Danielle Steel paperback. I emptied St. Germaine’s handbag, finding a worn wallet, a plastic pouch of cosmetics, a purple comb, an overdue phone bill, and a soft wool doll the size of my thumb.

The doll was crudely made of black yarn and colored plastic beads.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It’s for good luck, only.”

I sighed, dropped the doll back into St. Germaine’s handbag. “Ready to go, Ms. St. Germaine?” I said.

“I’m going home?”

As Jacobi and I drove to the Hall with St. Germaine in the backseat of the car, I started thinking ahead to the next forty-eight hours, wondering what Claire’s autopsy of young Jamie Sweet would show, hoping the killer had made a mistake, wondering if St. Germaine had a connection to Dennis Garza.

Most of all, I was hoping for a confession.

Hot damn. We’d finally gotten a break.

We had a suspect in custody.

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 120

CINDY’S SENSATIONAL FRONT-PAGE story about the MYSTERIOUS MARKERS OF DEATH had already hit the newsstands by the time we escorted Marie St. Germaine through the front doors of the Hall of Justice.

The chief had something to feed to the press, but as the day wore on, I started to feel the kind of nausea that comes from going around in circles. Jacobi and I had been in the box with Marie St. Germaine for four hours. The room behind the mirrored glass was packed to the walls with homicide inspectors as well as the chief and the DA.

For at least an hour, the mayor of San Francisco was back there, too.