Breakdown (35 page)

The Burbank cop didn’t seem to notice that I was taking a piece of paper from the Hyundai. Maybe his wraparound shades were too dark for him to see me clearly, or maybe Jana Shatka had rubbed him the wrong way, because he didn’t knock on her door, the way a cop usually would, to make sure the home owner knew the trespasser had been successfully rousted.

He followed me to the foot of the drive and leaned on his open squad-car door until I’d gotten into my Mustang. He followed me up Laramie until I turned west on Seventy-first Street, and then took off, his lights rotating and sparkling under the hot sun.

I drove on out to Downers Grove, followed the path to the hospital, lined up behind the other supplicants, pulled out my ID, and told the woman guarding the entrance that I had an appointment with Tania Metzger.

The gatekeeper handed me a pass and a map and moved on to the person behind me. I followed the dull brown paint on the floor to corridor B and the social work area. Tania Metzger wasn’t at her desk, but two other social workers, one a man about my age, the other a young woman, were in the bullpen. The woman was on the phone; the man was doing something with his computer.

Chantal, the secretary I’d met last week, greeted me. “Tania’s with a patient. Did you have some new information about Leydon?”

I shook my head, my conscience pricking me—I hadn’t checked in on her for several days now. I could have asked Lotty for an update when she was filling me in on Arielle’s condition.

“I went to see her, as Tania recommended, but I haven’t been able to get to the hospital this week. I actually came here today because of the orderly who was murdered this morning.”

“Murdered?” Chantal cried. “You mean Xavier? But they told us he killed himself.”

“It’s a convenient theory,” I said, “but it leaves a few questions unanswered. One of them I’m hoping you can answer for me.”

The woman finished her phone conversation and stood up. “I’m Alvina Northlake, director of this unit. Who are you?”

“Oh, Alvina, this is a detective”—Chantal looked at me—“I’m sorry, I forgot your name—yes, V. I. Warshawski—anyway, she’s a friend of Leydon Ashford. I told you she was here last week, asking questions about Leydon, which, of course, we couldn’t answer.”

“And now you’re asking questions about an orderly from the forensic wing?” Northlake’s brows rose above her outsize glasses. “If you have questions about him, I can give you the name of the supervisor of that unit.”

I pulled the greasy carbon of the Abilify requisition from my bag. “I’d welcome a chance to talk to someone in the forensic wing, but before you send me over there, can you look at this req? The signature’s too blurry for me to read—I was hoping someone who knew the staff here might recognize it.”

Northlake was interested despite her desire to make me follow hospital protocols. She skimmed the document, her mouth pursing in anger. “Where did you get this?”

“It was in the backseat of Xavier Jurgens’s car. Not his lovely new Camaro, where he died on a side street in Chicago. This was in the back of his old Hyundai, the car he usually drove to work.”

“Orderlies aren’t allowed to handle medication unless they’re being supervised,” Northlake said. “And this is an enormous amount of the drug, enough for twenty patients for a day—why would he have it? Why did they let him sign it?”

I put on my most saintly, trustworthy face. “That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me, Ms. Northlake. Do you recognize the doctor’s name?”

She squinted at the signature. “I can’t make it out.”

Chantal and the male social worker, who’d abandoned any pretense of working, joined her, looking at the form over her shoulder. Northlake started to fold it up, out of their sight, then shrugged and held it out to them. The two frowned over the signature but agreed it could belong to anyone.

“I can take it up to Lydia in Dr. Poynter’s office,” Chantal offered. “She might know if someone had asked Xavier to get the drug.”

Northlake grudgingly agreed that might be a good idea, then demanded to know how I’d gotten the form at all.

“I found Xavier Jurgens in his car this morning; he had a young girl locked in the trunk. When the doctors told me that both the girl and Jurgens had ingested Abilify, I went to his home to talk to his partner. This requisition was in the back of the car he usually drove to work. I’m curious about a couple of things: did he get hold of the drug because he wanted to kill himself? Why did he involve the girl? There doesn’t seem to be any connection between him and her. Unless it’s through the investigator who was murdered two weeks ago—in just about the same place where Jurgens died.”

Chantal looked at her boss, then at me. “Alvina—she might as well know—”

Northlake bristled. “Know what? Not about any patient here, even if she’s the woman’s mother.”

“No, no—about the dead detective.” Chantal turned to me. “You were asking about him going to the locked wing—well, Xavier was the person who let him in.”

The information didn’t startle me. “But Miles Wuchnik, the murdered detective, isn’t the person who gave Xavier the money for the Camaro; a third party did. Any hunches about that?”

“We wondered, or our security director wondered, where Jurgens got the money for it.” The man spoke for the first time. “They did an audit on the controlled substances, and there weren’t abnormal levels of filching. There’s always some in a hospital, you can’t get it down to zero, but no spikes, and nothing of the size that would have the street value of a sports car.”

“What about at the other end of the chain?” I asked, thinking of Mr. Contreras’s and my drug-ring theory. “Could someone be ordering massive amounts of drugs for the hospital, say, double what you’d normally use, and then reselling them on the street?”

Chantal and Northlake exchanged horrified looks with the male social worker. “I hope that isn’t possible,” Northlake said. “We’re supposed to have strict procedures in place for signatures and so on . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked at the requisition I’d brought in.

“The resale price for antipsychotics can’t be that great,” the man ventured.

“We get plenty of other drugs,” Northlake said sharply. “Percocet, Xanax, all those pain meds and tranquilizers have a good street value. But if you ordered such vast quantities that someone could buy a Camaro with the proceeds, then I think it would set off alarm bells in the pharmacy; it’s their cost center that would be affected. I’ll call around, see what I can learn—the last thing we need is for this hospital to be turned on its ear by having the state investigate us.”

“If you find out anything, please, can you let me know?” I said. “Wuchnik was blackmailing at least one person and likely more. Leydon thought he was spying on her, but she doesn’t have easy access to her trust fund to pay off someone like him, and anyway, I can’t imagine her letting a blackmailer get away with anything. But if you had some corrupt employees who were dealing drugs, I can easily see a blackmailer having a field day. Although how he found out, that’s another question.”

Tania Metzger had come into the bullpen at the tag end of the conversation. “I never heard any talk of Leydon being blackmailed.”

I looked at her. “When I was out here before, you told me that Leydon went into the forensic wing one day. I know you can’t repeat anything she said in therapy, but is there anything you can tell me about why she went there?”

Tania hesitated, then said, “She thought Wuchnik was spying on her and she took the opportunity to follow him.”

“Tania!” Alvina Northlake spoke sharply. “You are crossing a line here on confidentiality, and if you say anything else, you could be suspended.”

Tania started to apologize, then changed her mind. “That detective is dead, Leydon’s in a coma, and now one of our orderlies is dead, too. I understand the issues, but I really think the time has come to bend a little bit. Garrett McIntosh is the guard who let Leydon into the forensic unit. If you can get him to talk to you, he may know what she did when she was over there.”

Alvina glared at her, but her cell phone rang before she could say anything: her next patient was arriving. She and Tania were both spared an unpleasant confrontation.

35.

A HARD DAY’S HUNT—WITH PEASANTS

W
HEN
I
WENT TO THE FORENSIC UNIT’S GATE AND ASKED TO
speak with Garrett McIntosh, the guard on duty made it clear that I needed permission from Ruhetal’s security chief if I wanted to talk to any of the staff. This wasn’t the same guy who’d pocketed my twenty last week; today’s guard got pretty starchy when I casually held out a bill.

I went back to the hospital to see if Tania Metzger would help plead my case in the security office. Fortunately, Alvina Northlake was with a patient, and Tania had a few free minutes. She took me to the back of the hospital, where Vernon Mulliner, the security director, oversaw the hospital complex on a bank of monitors. Tania tried her hardest with Mulliner, telling him it was important for therapeutic reasons that we find out who Leydon had talked to when she broke into the forensic wing back in May; Tania explained that Garrett was the guard who’d assisted Leydon at the time.

Mulliner remembered me from my visit last week, and he wouldn’t budge. “Even a real detective would need a court order to question anyone in the forensic wing, and you, you’re an ambulance chaser who lies so she can sneak into places.”

“The last PI who snuck into the forensic wing ended up dead.” I pretended I hadn’t heard the part about my being a liar. “That’s why I’m coming to you. I expect the next people you’ll hear from will be Chicago cops, because your orderly was found dead in Chicago, and he left a text message apologizing for the death of Miles Wuchnik, the murdered PI. And Wuchnik’s sister may well sue you for negligence, letting one of your docs help Jurgens slip two hundred milligrams of Abilify from the pharmacy. I can help you prepare for this incoming flood, but I need to find out what Wuchnik and Xavier Jurgens were up to. Which means talking to your staff over there.”

“You tried to bribe your way into the locked wing.” Mulliner ignored my speech. “That may play well in Chicago, but here in Downers Grove we think the law is meant to be obeyed. By everyone.”

“Someone is spreading a lot of money around this hospital,” I said. “Orderlies get enough extra pay to buy new cars, senior staff get enough to buy mansions with swimming pools. Once the attorney general gets hold of that news, everyone working here at Ruhetal is going to see their bank accounts go under a microscope.”

Mulliner’s David Niven mustache quivered. After a long pause, he said, “You’d better leave the premises before I call some guards to carry you out. And you, Metzger, your family may have built this hospital a century ago, but your job depends on your adhering to
our
guidelines, not telling hospital secrets to outsiders.”

Tania dragged me out of the administrative offices as fast as possible and hurried me to the parking lot. “You’d better go. I really don’t want to get fired, not in this economy. I can’t jeopardize my conscience or my professional standing to help you.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” I said, hoping I meant it. “But if Leydon did tell you what she saw or who she spoke to, it matters that I hear about it now. It’s not just that your orderly died this morning—he had kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl, and she’d be dead, too, if I hadn’t arrived when I did. Miles Wuchnik was murdered ten days ago. Leydon Ashford may spend the rest of her life in a vegetative state. This is a scary body count. If Leydon gave you any other names or information about who she saw or what, tell me now, before the numbers get bigger.”

Metzger bit her lips, debating how much she could say without jeopardizing her professional standards and standing. “She didn’t tell me anything, not in direct words, which may be just as well—it makes my crisis of conscience easier to manage. She came back from the forensic wing shouting that everyone in America needed a lawyer and a video camera with them twenty-four hours a day, and then she started talking about being on fire, aflame with news. I didn’t know there were so many ways to talk about being burned until I listened to her the rest of that week. Singeing, she talking about that, and smoking out dead rats, and how it would take the mightiest of huntresses to blow on a dying coal and bring the conflagration back to life.”

My heart sank. “I’m the person she means when she talks about the mightiest of huntresses, and I have no more idea what all that symbolism means than, well, than you do yourself.”

A car marked “Ruhetal Security” pulled up next to us. “Mr. Mulliner sent me to ask if you needed help getting rid of this woman, Ms. Metzger.”

Tania flushed. “No, no, I’m fine.”

“And you, lady,” the guard said to me, “he asked me to remind you there’s no loitering in the parking lot.”

His tone was respectful, but the message was unmistakable—time for me to move on. I waved good-bye to Metzger, told her to call if anything else came to her, and left the hospital grounds.

I drove into the center of Downers Grove to find coffee and a snack. While I ate, I looked up McIntosh’s home address in Lexis. Aurora, eighteen miles to the west.

I got on the westbound tollway just after the afternoon shift changed at Ruhetal. The speed limits in the western suburbs were apparently posted as fictions to entertain drivers, who hurtled homeward as if a prize awaited the person who reached their driveway first. The sun, drifting lower in the summer sky, created a glare on my windshield that was giving me a headache, but the traffic was so wild I couldn’t relax.

McIntosh’s ranch house on Fifth Avenue was about fifty years old and needed work. I felt a certain kinship: I, too, was about fifty, and my techniques for getting information definitely needed work. I’d failed this morning with Nia Durango, and then with Ruhetal’s security director. And, as it turned out, I didn’t fare better with Garrett McIntosh.

McIntosh had been one of the winners in the commuting race. He came to the door still wearing his guard’s uniform, although he’d taken off the tie and undone the shirt. Like so many people from Ruhetal, he wasn’t happy to see me and he wouldn’t let me into his house. At least he didn’t attack me with a butcher knife, but he did tell me to mind my own business if I didn’t want to get hurt.