Текст книги "Brain Dead"
Автор книги: Eileen Dreyer
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 26 страниц)
Conrad lifted a finger in exception, and Timmie noticed the perfectly manicured nail. "Even if all the victims were Restcrest patients, not all Restcrest patients were victims. Why these?"
Timmie nodded. "Maybe the families can tell me. I'll talk to them. I'm also doing a couple of shifts at Restcrest."
Conrad grimaced for her and patted her arm, knowing perfectly well what that meant. "Bellissima, you come see me. I'll comfort you. In the meantime, why don't I just trundle this little gem of a list off to my friends in the FBI and see if they have something familiar in their famous computer?"
"Ooooh," Timmie answered, her eyes lighting for the first time. "A pattern? You'd do that for me?"
"I'd slay neurosurgeons for you, mi amore. Now, eat your pasta. The garlic will protect you from doctors." And he laughed, as if everything they had discussed were light and silly.
Timmie couldn't remain quite so sanguine. "Don't be too noisy about it, Conrad. I don't know who's all involved. I know it's enough people to spare at least three of them to beat up a reporter who's helping me, and some of them might have been cops."
Conrad nodded vigorously and attacked his soup, his attention still on the printout. "Well then, we'll be as quiet as church mice until we find something. And then I'll personally call some very trustworthy people and have them sweep in like the Valkyrie and clean up that town. How's that sound?"
"Distressingly operatic."
Conrad dropped his spoon. "You must love opera, bella donna. Don't break my heart."
Timmie found she could laugh again. "Conrad, I'd rather sit through a four-day hemorrhoidectomy marathon."
First Conrad grimaced, hand to chest. Then, in typical fashion, he threw back his head, laughed, and finished his soup.
* * *
By the time Timmie began to wend her way back home, she was humming. She had an ally. Not that Murphy wasn't an ally, but Conrad was a known quantity. He was an official with enough pull in the state to take care of matters once they were brought to his attention. He'd given her hope that she could get out of this fairly unscathed. All she had to do was survive a shift over at Restcrest, a furtive dig through the lives of patient families, and her regular shifts down in ER with Angie, one of which she was due for in less than three hours.
That three hours gave her enough time to take the scenic route home. Instead of whizzing out the very uninspiring Highway 70 with all the other harried commuters and over-the-road truckers, she turned off onto Highway 94 and drove the north bank of the Missouri River.
It was worth it. The sun was high and the clouds moving fast. The fields still held their green and rolled away toward a horizon of trees that sparkled with their last clinging leaves. Farm buildings gleamed where they sat tucked into the folds of land, and around some corners, the Missouri appeared, glistening and grand and silent.
Once away from the heavier suburbs, the road twisted and climbed and dropped like a rural roller coaster, the only sounds filtering past Timmie's rock and roll birdsong and church bells. Altogether a lovely reward for the trip. Timmie cranked up the radio, this time to accompany the choreography of the road, and reacquainted herself with the joys of a stick shift.
She wasn't really paying attention to other traffic unless it was somebody she had to pass on the two-lane road, or a car she didn't want to demolish coming the other way. So when the black Bonneville showed up in her rearview mirror, she noted it and downshifted to set up for the next corner. The Bonneville moved closer. Timmie saw a sign for the Herman wineries and thought about taking Meghan on a Katy Trail bike ride and stopping over. She heard Willie Nelson on the radio and turned it up even louder, the perfect companion for a back road. She'd just noticed that she had a long clear ribbon of road ahead when something smacked into her car.
"Son of a..."
Cyrano lurched, shuddered, swerved. Timmie tightened her hold on the wheel and lifted her foot off the pedals just long enough to see what had happened.
The Bonneville had hit her, right in the ass. Timmie thought of stopping. Getting out and yelling at the jerk. She thought of slowing and just letting him pass if he was so bent on it.
He wasn't. She realized that in the split second before the Bonneville rammed her again. Harder. Smack against the right rear fender so she'd swerve right off the road down toward the river.
Her adrenals kicked in like afterburners. "Shit!"
It took a little maneuvering, but she regained control and accelerated. Timmie tried hard to see into the car, but its windows were tinted. A guy, she figured, because most women didn't handle cars like that. Which was probably why this guy thought he could just take her out in the middle of the afternoon on a country road. He probably figured he had a nurse in an old French car, what could it take? One or two good hits, she'd be over the edge.
And then what?
Which was when it hit her that he very possibly wanted her dead. He certainly wanted her disabled. He'd backed the Bonneville away a bit. For another try, Timmie realized suddenly when she heard the growl of a couple hundred horses revving up. The son of a bitch really was trying to run her off the road.
It made her smile. The guy had picked the wrong road and the wrong girl. If this had been a straightaway, she wouldn't have stood a chance. That car had at least a hundred horses on her. It was newer, and it was sure as hell heavier. But this stretch of Highway 94 was nothing but curves and hills, which made the driving just as important as the horsepower. And if there was one thing Timmie knew after besting just about every canyon road and interstate in Los Angeles County, it was how to drive.
"You want me, asshole," she said, sucking in a breath and spitting on her stick-shift hand, "you come get me."
With an apology to Cyrano's old engine, Timmie slammed him into second and took off. Cyrano screamed like an outraged woman. The road ahead bent on itself like a frying snake. Howling with the kind of sheer, stupid glee she hadn't felt in months, Timmie took it like a rocket. Swooping over the hills, she tracked across both lanes as she set up the apex of each corner to make its cleanest turn, one hand on the wheel, one on the stick shift, her right foot rocking constantly between brake and gas as she double-clutched into each turn and then eased up to let her gas foot have the fun along another stretch of clear road.
She kept her focus on the road ahead rather than the road behind. Unless this guy was road-race trained, he wouldn't keep up with her. But she didn't want to run down some unsuspecting grandma just trying to get to her daughter's. And the way the hills folded up against one another, it was tough to judge too far, especially doing seventy.
The Bonneville fought valiantly against gravity. Its wheels screamed. Timmie thought she could see the brakes smoke on more than one turn. She heard more than one squeal of protest from overdriven tires. Which meant, she figured, that the guy driving wasn't the cop who'd gone after Murphy. Cops drove better than that. A cop would at least have made it a tight contest.
Timmie spent a millisecond too long assessing her pursuer, missed her line around a tight turn by inches and almost ended up on two wheels, saving herself with a little heel-toe action as she double-clutched down into a tight S turn that had a twenty-mile-an-hour warning sign on it. Timmie took it at fifty.
She was doing eighty when she passed the You Are Leaving St. Charles County sign. The road leveled out for a bit and Timmie downshifted for better acceleration. She was going to lose ground here, and she knew it.
So did the Bonneville. Timmie could hear that engine winding out. She saw the next curve coming, hoped it would be soon enough, knew that if this guy smacked her at this speed she wouldn't come to earth till she hit the far bank of the river.
He was inching up. Timmie found herself leaning forward, as if she could get a few more mph just by gravity. The curve was close, closer, beckoning like a mirage in a terrifying desert. Timmie's heart was knocking against her chest like every poor, overworked piston in her engine. But she was going to make it. She could get to the next set of curves and keep going, because there was a town nearby. People. Witnesses this guy didn't want. She reached for the stick shift and stomped her foot on the clutch, and knew the guy behind her had lost.
Timmie had forgotten one important thing. She hadn't driven in Missouri in over ten years. In that time, she'd never had to deal with ice on the road. It was one o'clock in the afternoon on a sunny day. The temperature still hovered at freezing, though, and the hills to the north kept the sun off the road. Timmie didn't even see the patch of black ice she hit. She just suddenly found herself airborne, with a panoramic view of the Missouri River out her windshield, and knew she was screwed.
Chapter 16
Thank God for seat belts. It was about the only coherent thought Timmie had for about fifteen minutes as she stared blankly out her front window into the bushes that had ended up catching her. She would have been pavement pizza if she hadn't been strapped in. As it was, she was hanging from the shoulder strap like a parachutist who hit a tree. Her head hurt, her chest hurt, and her hands, still wrapped around the wheel as if holding her in the car, felt as if they'd shattered on impact.
Amazing. She could still see the river, not more than twenty yards off. Rolling, rolling... no, that was the Mississippi. Besides, it wasn't rolling at all. She'd sailed right to the edge of some farmer's pond. Oh, well. Maybe that was the farmer himself she heard trying to get into her car.
He wasn't going to have any luck. The door was locked. Another legacy of life in the fast lane. Timmie locked her car doors if she was going to sit in her driveway to think.
Now the person was tapping, scraping around the car as if trying to find a better way to get in. Timmie sighed. She guessed she was going to have to move. She tried to reach around for the seat-belt release and couldn't. Something was in her way. Besides, her shoulder hurt when she stretched.
"Just a... minute," she called out, which made her head hurt.
He didn't wait. He punched out her rear window. Timmie couldn't see him. She couldn't get her head around. But she heard the distinctive pop and crunch and tinkle of glass tumbling onto her backseat. She felt sick. She smelled gas and remembered how to feel afraid.
"I need a little help getting out," she ventured, trying again to reach her seat belt. Failing.
"Where the fuck is it?" he said, a baritone with a south St. Louis accent.
Not the farmer, then. Timmie finally remembered the reason she'd been sailing over farm silos and fought a new rush of fear. The smell of gas was even stronger, and the man who'd broken into her car wasn't there to get her out.
"If you get me unlatched I'm sure I can help you look," she tried.
Timmie could hear him rifling through the backseat, and then the front. She actually caught sight of a head of hair. Dark. Thick. Oily. No face to go with it, though. Kind of like talking to a badly groomed Cousin Itt.
"You took it with you this morning. That's what they said."
"Who said?" she asked. "And if you knew I had it this long, why the hell didn't you just break into my car when it was sitting on the street? You didn't have to chase me through two counties."
"Shut up."
"And I expect you to pay for that window," she said. "Not to mention the rest of my car. Asshole. You ran me off the road."
He laughed. "You misjudged the turn."
"I did not. I hit ice."
Timmie did give a passing thought to how ridiculous the conversation was. Better than screaming for mercy, she guessed.
"What'd you do with it?" he demanded, shaking her by the shoulder this time. Like that would help. All it did was dislodge a few more brain cells so they probably scattered over her seat like broken glass.
"Find it yourself."
She didn't have a clue what he was talking about.
"Hey!" an old voice yelled nearby. "You all right there?"
Timmie could hear the guy moving toward the back of the car. "Call 911!" he yelled. "A drunk ran off the road!"
That was what cleared Timmie's head. "Drunk?" she demanded. "I'm not drunk. I am not drunk!" she yelled for whoever was outside, as if that would make a difference.
"Do yourself a favor," the guy said almost in her ear. "Ditch that piece of paper. And forget I was ever here."
She would have if she hadn't caught sight of his hand scrabbling through the nursing bag she'd left on the passenger seat. If she hadn't seen the gold-and-cat's-eye ring on its pinkie. Its bent pinkie. Its square, pale, scraped pinkie. Timmie took one look out of the corner of her eye and knew she could identify that fifth digit anywhere. She didn't say anything to the guy, though. She didn't even say anything to the farmer when he finally returned leading a parade of fire engines and police cars. She waited until she was in her own ER, strapped to a backboard like a bagged deer and blinking in the overhead lights.
"The printout!" she gasped, coming to her senses.
Of course. The carefully guarded, top-secret, all-revealing Morbidity and Mortality printout they'd been tossing back and forth for the last week or so like a hockey puck in overtime. It was the only thing Timmie had been carrying in that nursing bag except an extra pair of nylons, and if that guy had run her off the road just for used panty hose, she had more problems than she'd thought.
"Pardon?" Dr. Chang asked as she bent over her upside down, her face as round as a moon. The Halloween moon, except this one was frowning and kind and much, much younger. And the goblins chasing Timmie weren't pretend.
Timmie began to shake. "Nothing. Isn't Barb on?"
"You don't like me?"
"I love you, Chang. Really. I just need to ask Barb something."
"She busy. And you need c-spine films."
"My c spines are fine. I need to get up."
"No. No, you stay. We get films. Behave."
Great. A third-year resident from Beijing sounding just like her mother.
Other people came in. A couple of day-shift people and the portable X-ray tech and one of the other day docs. A couple of local cops in jackboots who tried not to laugh when Timmie told them a guy in a Bonneville and a pinkie ring had tried to run her off Highway 94. Timmie lay on the board getting stiffer by the minute and trying her damnedest to pretend she wasn't affected by what had just happened.
Maybe the guy who'd done this had just been stupid. Or maybe he hadn't cared whether she'd lived or died. Or maybe she would have been dead no matter what if that farmer hadn't shown up.
Definitely not things to consider when tied down so a person couldn't walk off the news. Which meant Timmie lay there shaking hard from adrenaline and a delayed terror she refused to admit, and focused everything she had on eavesdropping on the hallway. Which really didn't make her feel much better, either.
"Well, it's not really such a surprise," somebody said upon being informed of the identity of their newest patient. "She drives anything like she walks, she should be crippled."
"I should have known," Ellen all but wailed when she arrived for work to hear the news. Timmie wondered if Ellen thought she walked too fast, too.
And then, at least to amuse Timmie, Cindy's reaction.
"She's luckier than I was when it happened to me," she informed the person who'd told her, even as Ellen walked into Timmie's room in high-comfort mode.
"Are you all right?" Ellen demanded, patting the first available arm she could find.
"Although, of course, if it hadn't been for the accident," Cindy was going on, "I never would have met Fireman Dan."
Fireman Dan?
"Timmie?" Ellen said, patting harder. "Who did this? Is Meghan okay?"
"Ah, Fireman Dan," Cindy was saying outside the door. "Finest turnout gear in the city..."
Timmie's first reaction was to yell. That was her life Cindy had absconded with out there. Aw, what the hell. She laughed instead, which just made Ellen frown.
"I'm fine," Timmie said. "Meghan's fine. She wasn't there."
"You have to be more careful," Ellen insisted, still upset.
Cindy called greetings from the door on her way by.
Ellen headed off to be Restcrest's relief, and Timmie was left behind with the boring ceiling, the boring light fixtures, and the boring wait for negative films. And, of course, the boring fact that she was getting more frightened by the minute now that the real danger was over. Good trauma nurse that she was.
"Timmie! My God, Timmie, is that you?"
Timmie still couldn't move her head. There was surgical tape stretched across her forehead and chin to stabilize her to the c-collar and board. She could tell that voice, though, and wondered what the hell he was doing down here.
"You didn't have another graduation ceremony, did you?" she asked, swiveling her eyes as far as she could to catch the golden head just inside the door, conferring with the black one.
"What?"
She sighed, teeth chattering. "Nothing, Alex. I'm fine, really. Convince Chang, will you?"
Alex floated into her vision like a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. "The ambulance crew said your car was totaled. He said something about alcohol. Honey, what happened?"
"There was no alcohol, Alex," she said simply. "You know that. I hit a patch of black ice on 94 and did a Bullitt over some guy's cow pasture. That's all."
Alex's smile was fond and worried. "It's enough, honey. You look like you lost a prizefight. Although I hear you have a heck of a tattoo."
Timmie blushed, scowled, and grumbled, "I know some EMTs who should be running for their lives this very second."
"Are you really okay?" he asked, all joking aside as he lay a hand on her shoulder.
"I'm sore," she said to the ceiling. "Do you have any idea how hard these damn backboards are? My butt's asleep, and I'm gonna be picking adhesive off my chin for a week."
He grinned. "You don't sound too injured to me."
"Yeah, well. That's what I've been trying to tell them."
"I'm glad you're okay." His smile was radiant. "When I heard from Ellen, I ran right down. If you need anything... I mean, I have to head out of town for a couple of days, but if there's anything, I mean, anything I can do."
Tell me why people are dying in your unit. Tell me if you told someone to do this to me.
"Thank you, Alex. I'm fine."
"My car. You can use the Lexus while I'm gone."
Timmie's laugh was a surprised bark. "Why? You need that crash-tested, too?"
"I'm serious."
"Okay. Thank you. If you really want to help, though, tell Chang to get me off this damn board before I walk it down the hall."
Alex, knowing better, just patted, and Timmie was left to wonder.
* * *
Timmie ended up with X rays of everything but her ankles, four staples in her head, and an excuse from work that afternoon, which Angie accepted with predictable bad humor.
"But that's all right," she said with an alligator smile. "I have the perfect place for you to recuperate. Since you're supposed to work tomorrow, why don't you just do your ten over in Restcrest? They're short, and we're not, and you shouldn't be running around anyway, isn't that right?"
Timmie didn't have to lie about wanting to go to Restcrest after all. She did everything but call Angie a Republican. Ellen saved her job by appearing just then to take her home.
Barb caught up with the two of them as they reached the driveway. She was wearing virtually the same expression as Alex, although Timmie had to admit that it didn't look quite as attractive on Barb.
"You idiot!" the big woman snapped.
Alex had also said "I worried about you" better. The problem with that was that Barb was the one who was going to make Timmie cry. So Timmie bluffed her way through it.
"You shoulda been there, Barb," she teased. "I could see all the way to my house. I swear that poor farmer thought we were doing a remake of Smokey and the Bandit."
Barb just planted herself in Timmie's way, tears sparkling in her soft gray eyes. "You... total... idiot!"
No, Barb. Laugh. Don't make it real. Timmie swallowed hard against the fear Barb's concern was going to let loose again.
"I'm fine," she insisted, holding her arms out as if to prove it. "Really."
Barb glared harder, the tears brighter. "Don't... ever do that to me again," she said. "When I heard what happened—"
Timmie didn't know how else to shut her up. It looked silly as hell, but Timmie didn't know what else to do but put her arms around her friend. Which she did, barely. On her toes.
"I'm not in the mood for more funerals," was all Barb could manage.
It took a few moments, but when Barb straightened, she was dry eyed and in control. She held her hand out to Ellen. "Give me the bag. I'll take her home."
"But..."
Barb didn't say another word. Ellen just handed it over. "Thank you, Barb," she said. "I really did want to get back over to the unit. Little Mrs. Worthmueller isn't doing very well right now."
Timmie thanked her for taking the time, and Barb held her tongue until Ellen had made it inside the door. Then Barb, carrying the plastic personal effects bag that held Timmie's bloodied and scissored clothes like a dead mouse, turned a scrub clothes and Doc Martens-clad Timmie back toward the parking lot.
"So what happened?" she demanded.
Sucking in a steadying breath, Timmie told her.
"Why?" Barb asked. "It makes no sense. All that stuff's in the computer already."
Her attention more on negotiating a suddenly high curb with very sore hips, Timmie shrugged. "To give them a chance to change something on the records they didn't want anybody else to know?"
Barb shook her head. "Then they would have done it by now. I spent the morning looking everything up, and it isn't any different. There were fifteen patients from Restcrest turfed to the ER to die, another six who died in the unit because the family wouldn't allow them moved, and four more who died of cardiac arrest before the policy change. Of those, only six died of something else definable."
Timmie slowed almost to a near stop right in the middle of the traffic lane. "You really think they were killed."
"I looked through at least seven charts. Every one of those deaths was a surprise. Sudden respiratory arrest. Sudden cardiac crash. Amazing how surprised a nurse can sound with just the words 'patient had been stable until arrest.'"
Timmie had almost made it past that first jolt of fear. This stopped her dead in her tracks. Last chance to escape the inevitable, and Barb had closed the door. There were people dying, and other people covering up the fact. Not a huge surprise in a hospital. It happened. Nobody liked to admit mistakes, especially when mistakes tended to cost lives and millions in litigation. But this...
This.
Timmie sighed, closed her eyes. "Fuck."
Barb looked way down at Timmie the way a mother does when her child first realizes that the world isn't a place Santa Claus would live in after all. "Let's get you home," she suggested. "We can finish the editorial portion of this program then."
Timmie started walking again, but the questions began to circle relentlessly. If that guy hadn't wanted the list, what had he wanted? If there were deaths being covered up, just who was committing them? And who was covering them up?
Timmie stood there shivering while Barb unlocked the Volvo's door, and all she could think of was that she wanted to sleep. For hours. Days. Weeks. Amazing how predictable the body was. When in danger, run. Or hide. Or both. Down at the end of the lane, one of the security wagons was trolling for problems. Timmie didn't pay a lot of attention.
"I'm going to have to talk to those nurses up there tomorrow," she said, thinking specifically of one very dedicated nurse. "They'll know..."
Something. She'd been about to say it. She lost the word somewhere in the millisecond of time it took to see the security guard waving hello to Barb as he trundled past. The guard with the thick black hair and potbelly.
The guard with the cat's-eye-and-gold ring on his left pinkie.
Well, no wonder, Timmie thought as she stood there gaping like a Kansas farmer in Manhattan. She'd been right. It hadn't been a cop. It had been somebody who played one on his job. A security guard. From the hospital.
"O-o-o-h, shit," she muttered, struggling not to make eye contact or run. Probably a good thing. The look the guard shot her on the way by left no doubt that he was here to make sure she didn't recognize him.
"Oh shit what?" Barb asked, throwing the bag with Timmie's clothes in the car and holding the door open for Timmie to follow.
Wondering how it could be that nobody else seemed to be able to see her shake, Timmie tried to grin. "I'll tell you later at the house."
* * *
"Think," Barb demanded an hour later as they sat sprawled in Timmie's living room with sodas and ice packs. "You have something somebody in that hospital wants pretty badly."
"Nothing!" Timmie insisted again. "Not if they haven't changed the M and M sheets."
"He didn't hurt you in any way."
"No. I think he just wasn't good enough at his job to lift my bag earlier." She hoped he just wasn't good enough. "He probably saw that running-a-car-off-a-road stunt in a Sylvester Stallone movie somewhere."
"Seems pretty stupid."
"So did he."
Barb finished her soda like a shot and grimaced. "So, what do we do now?"
Timmie pushed herself off her chair and tried not to groan. She was not a very good victim, especially when she ached. She was a worse target, though. "I need to catch Conrad before he disappears with that list. Maybe he's spotted something I missed."
But Conrad had already disappeared. All Timmie had to talk to was his answering machine, which pleaded for her to make him a happy man with a message and then wished everyone a musical "Ciao, bambini."
Timmie left her message. Standing there doing it, she saw that her answering machine was blinking and instinctively hit the Replay button. There was a message to call her insurance company and the leftover one from Murphy, who had wanted to warn her about new phone threats. Then there was one other.
"What games are you playing now, Timmie?" an aggrieved male voice demanded, making Timmie flush so hard her head spun again. "You telling the courts I gave Meghan drugs? Got her drunk? I've had a little trouble and you get righteous and vindictive. Well, I have my rights. I'm here, I'm going to see my daughter, and then I'll show everyone just what pain you've caused me. Think about it, Timmie."
Timmie just stood there as the machine beeped, clicked, and went silent.
"Obviously the ex," Barb suggested dryly. "He does have the West Coast concession on rationalization, doesn't he?"
Well, at least it washed out the fear for a while. Timmie was so angry she could hardly speak. "The pain I've caused him?" she demanded, not realizing how much she sounded like Barb had with the court order in her hand. "The games I've played? He's got almost three million stashed away somewhere and I haven't seen a penny's child support since he walked out the door, and he's dragged me through court for thirteen months just to do it, and I'm playing games with him? How dare he!"
She was trembling now. Barb, her own rage buried along with her ex, leaned back and smiled. "He's a man. That's how dare he. Because, like most men, he's never grown up. And you want to know why? I've thought about this a lot lately, you know."
Not in the mood to be anybody's straight man, Timmie just glared.
Barb grinned. "Because we never wean them off the breast, that's why."
The doorbell didn't even ring. The door just flew open and hurried footsteps echoed in the hallway. Timmie had been expecting Meghan. But unless Megs had graduated to size thirteen large overnight, this wasn't Megs. It wasn't. Like the perfect punctuation to a senseless conversation, there stood Murphy.
Timmie couldn't help it. She laughed. She laughed so hard her ribs hurt where the seat belt had bruised them, and she had to sit down. "I never thought of it that way, Barb. You're right."
"About what?" Murphy demanded, panting.
"That you never grew up," Barb said over her shoulder.
"If I'd grown up, I wouldn't have been a reporter," Murphy assured her, then turned to Timmie. "You okay?"
Timmie smiled more than she'd intended. "I look worse than you. I got staples."
He faltered to a halt right at the edge of the section of floor where he'd spent the other night sprawled. "I got more."
"You win. What are you doing here?"
He grimaced and leaned over, hands on knees, panting a little. "You kidding? There's a police scanner at the paper. The minute Sherilee heard who was involved, she made it a point to call me personally. She still smells an expose. Is this expose material, or did you just fall asleep at the wheel?"
Amazing how many words he could fit between panting breaths. Timmie motioned him to the couch. "You sure you jog?"
That made him glare. "You know how much fun it is to run with busted ribs?"
"What about that fancy-ass Cabriolet you have?"
Barb finally lost her temper. "Just sit down, for God's sake. You're both idiots."
So Murphy sat down, and Timmie gave him the Cliff Notes version of her amazing feat of aerodynamics. She also filled both of them in on what her mother had said about Restcrest and Conrad had said about the deaths. Which led her inevitably back to her aborted ride home.
"But who's doing it?" Timmie asked. "Who told that guy to get... whatever it is he was after?"
"What about old Mary Jane Arlington?" Murphy offered. "Remember how I tried to tell you she'd worked with the golden boy before? She has, in fact, been promoted from floor nurse to supervisor to vice president since the first unit failed."
Barb sat right down.
Timmie blinked. "She's worked in all three of the units?"
Murphy's smile was on a par with a shark's. "It pays to have drunk the best editors in the country under the table. I found out that Mary Jane has managed to parlay a nursing degree and a night school bachelor's in generic science to a hundred-thousand-dollar-plus-a-year job as senior vice president of the Alzheimer's Research Unit and Restcrest Nursing Home. Pretty heady stuff, don't you think?"
