Diagnosis Murder 7 - The Double LIfe (13 page)

Steve took out his notebook. "Okay, step it forward. I want to see the next three or four cars that follow him."

"It's the blue Honda Accord," she said, hitting play. "It stays three cars behind him, matching his lane changes, all the way into the Valley."

"You really are desperate for some honest-to-God police work, aren't you?"

"It's that or play with paper clips. Besides, I like Mark, and I resent it when people try to run over my friends. The Camaro transitions to the eastbound Ventura Freeway and gets off at the Van Nuys exit. So does the Honda. In fact, she follows him up Van Nuys Boulevard and then they make a !eft on Addison, presumably headed to Kester, where the car was dumped."

Steve gave Tanis a look. "She?"

"Her windows weren't tinted." Tanis handed him back the remote and reached into her leather jacket again, pulling out a manila envelope that was folded down the middle to fit in her pocket. She gave the envelope to him. "I made a still and blew it up."

Steve opened the envelope and looked at the picture. It was blurry and had a crease down the middle, but he could see she was a white woman in her twenties, with short blond hair, smoking a cigarette.

"I suppose you ran her plates," Steve said.

Tanis reached into her back pocket for her notebook, flipped it open, and read aloud: "Her name is Wendy Duren, age twenty-seven, lives in Encino. No arrests, no outstanding warrants, no prints in the system."

"I'm surprised you didn't arrest her."

"Can I?" Tanis asked.

"There's no evidence that she's committed any crime," Steve said.

"That hasn't stopped me before."

"I know. That's why you're liaising instead of detecting." 

"I detect," she said. "Look at all I just detected for you." 

"Now that you mention it, how do the folks in Anti-Terrorism feel about you doing all this work for me?" Steve asked.

"I push paper. They don't know, or care, what paper I'm pushing."

"Good, because I'm pressed for manpower," Steve said. "Do you think you could use that computer of yours to crunch some data for me?"

"That lady in the Honda looks like a terrorist to me. What do you think?"

"Definitely A1 Qaeda," Steve agreed.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

After Tanis left, Steve called the hospital to check on his father. Jesse told him that although Mark was still unconscious, he was stable. There appeared to be no further swelling or subdural bleeding.

"So when is he going to wake up?" Steve asked.

"It could be in the next five minutes or five days from now. I can't say."

"And when he does wake up, I assume he's going to have some headaches, dizziness, disorientation, that kind of thing."

"Of course," Jesse said.

"Will there be any lasting injury?"

"He might not remember the accident or even what he was doing that morning," Jesse said. "Some degree of amnesia is common in head traumas like this."

"How bad can it be?"

"Why do you always want to know the worst-case scenario?"

"I like to be prepared."

"The amnesia may go back a few minutes or all the way to day one. He could wake up and have no idea who he is or who you are. Whatever memories he's lost could eventually come back or not at all."

"Wonderful," Steve said.

"You asked," Jesse said. "Is there anything I can do to help with the investigation?"

"Thanks, but you did plenty last night."

"I ate three slices of pizza and fell asleep," Jesse said. 

"That was good work. Some of your best."

"C'mon, I really want to do something."

Steve was concerned about getting Jesse into trouble. If any hospital officials ever discovered that he'd been foraging through confidential patient records, his career could be ruined. But Steve needed more information and he knew Jesse could get it for him.

"You could get fired if you're caught," Steve said.

"And the secretary will disavow any knowledge of my actions."

"What secretary?" Steve asked.

"Didn't you ever watch
Mission: Impossible
when you were a kid?" Jesse said. "Look, whatever it is you want me to do, it's worth the risk if it means catching some doctor who is killing people entrusted to his care."

"You think that argument will save your ass if you get caught?"

"Hell no," Jesse said. "So it's a good thing I'm also in the restaurant business."

That was exactly what Steve told himself every time he bent the rules or made one of his typical political blunders. He might lose his badge and his gun, but at least there was an apron with his name on it waiting for him at Barbeque Bob's.

"Can you get into the computerized patient records at John Muir, Reseda Medical Center, Woodland Hospital, and West Valley Presbyterian?"

"Can Ashlee Simpson sing?" Jesse asked.

"Nope."

"Yes, I can get into their databases," Jesse said. "What do you need?"

"See if any of the seven hundred eighty names on our list of people who nearly died within a year of their eventual deaths were ever patients at one of those hospitals."

"I bet you can't say that three times fast."

Jesse hung up and Steve went back to calling retirement homes in the Valley and requesting their personnel records. In the meantime, the information he'd requested in his calls earlier that morning started to come in, most of it via e-mail. That meant he had more names to cross-check against the nearly eight hundred patients they were already sorting through. He was drowning in names and starving for clues.

Starving.

Steve suddenly realized how hungry he was. It was a few minutes after one, and he hadn't eaten since seven that morning. So he got up and grabbed a vending-machine lunch, consciously selecting healthy entrées from the major food groups—vegetable, dairy, and meat. He took his potato chips, cheese doodles, and pork rinds back to his desk so he could eat while he worked.

He called Amanda and told her he would e-mail her the names of hospital and retirement home employees as they came in.

"You want me to cross-check these names with the medical records of the dead people on our list," Amanda surmised.

"At least that should narrow things down a little," Steve said.

"Not enough," she said.

"I'm working on that," he said, telling her about Wendy Duren, the woman the traffic cameras captured following the Camaro. "We're running a complete background check on her."

"So you think she'll lead us to whoever stole that car and tried to run over Mark."

Amanda's comment gave Steve an idea. "Maybe I'm going at this backwards."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm just thinking out loud," Steve said. "Give me a call when you've got something."

"Considering how much work is involved, I wouldn't wait by the phone if I were you," she said. "You could end up missing a few holidays."

Steve thanked her for her efforts, then turned to his computer and copied Tanis Archer on all the personnel information he'd e-mailed to Amanda. He finished off the crumbs of his cheese doodles and headed out to see Tanis.

He found her downtown in the sub-basement of Parker Center in a windowless concrete room with exposed pipes running along the ceiling. There was an old trash chute in the corner, and a wheeled linen hamper sat below the mouth to catch whatever papers and files dropped down from the floors above.

Tanis, dressed in a tank top and cargo pants, was sitting at her dented and scratched gunmetal gray desk. She had a surprisingly sleek and expensive computer setup on the desktop, surrounded by teetering stacks of bulging files. Wires connecting the computer to the network were strapped together with plastic clasps and dangled from the clutter of pipes on the ceiling. A large paper shredder and a bulging collection bag containing the classified confetti sat beside her desk.

The air smelled like an old library that was being used as a gymnasium locker room.

"Somehow I imagined the headquarters of the LAPD Anti-Terrorism Strike Force would be a little bit more impressive," Steve said as he came in. "I figured it would be a slick, high-tech war room with flat-screen monitors everywhere streaming data and images from around the world. I thought it would be filled with people racing the clock to prevent disasters."

"I'm sure it is all those things and in a bat cave too. I've never been there. This is the liaison's office. Very low tech. Requests come in"—she tipped her head towards the trash chute—"I route them through the proper channels and shred the correspondence."

"Someone upstairs doesn't want to leave a paper trail," he said.

"Somebody upstairs doesn't want to be hauled in front of the Senate subcommittee someday."

"So, where's the Eiffel Tower?" Steve asked.

"Is that what you came all the way down here to see?"

"I don't get to Paris much," Steve said with a shrug.

Tanis opened her lower desk drawer and lifted out a pile of interconnected paper clips shaped in a lopsided triangle that came to a sharp point.

He supposed it could be the Eiffel Tower. It could also be me of the great pyramids of Egypt or a Hershey's Kiss.

"It's nice. Very French," he said. "Why do you keep it in a drawer?"

"So I won't be tempted to throw myself on it in a fit of suicidal boredom." Tanis put her Eiffel Tower away, kicked the drawer closed, and snatched a paper out of the laser printer. "I ran that background check for you on Wendy Duren."

"Is she a member of Al Qaeda or Hamas?"

"Appleby Nursing Services," Tanis said.

Steve felt an immediate charge, so sharp he could almost rear the snap and crackle. It was the first solid lead, the kind that can break a case wide open.

Tanis regarded the expression on Steve's face. "Yeah, I thought you'd like that. Appleby is a hiring agency that provides in-home nurses, caregivers, physical therapists, and household assistants for medical care, errands, whatever. They work part-time or full-time, live-in and live-out, or even just by the hour."

"Can you find out if any of the patients Duren saw are on our list?"

"I'm already working with Amanda on that," Tanis said.

"We also need to find out who else works at Appleby Nursing Services and if they had any contact with those same patients."

"Way ahead of you," she said, stroking the computer monitor as if it were an obedient pet. "I've already starting inputting the names."

"I know I've asked you to do a lot already, but I have another favor to ask."

"Don't worry about it. You're doing me a favor," Tanis said. "It's either help you or feed myself to the shredder." 

"You may be feeding your career to it by helping me," he said.

"Don't flatter yourself," she said. "I'm perfectly capable of destroying my life on my own. I've been working diligently at it for a while now."

"I think there's another way to ID the driver of that Camaro. It's not easy to steal a car without some previous experience at it. Can you see if any of the hospital, retirement home, or nursing service employees have any grand theft auto convictions in their past?"

"That's no biggie," she said. "You can do that from your desk."

"Yes, but I can't get into sealed juvenile records," Steve said. "Can you?"

She smiled. "Anti-Terrorism is an all-purpose pass to violate privacy and civil rights. It's patriotic, even. Why do you think we call it the Patriot Act?"

"Is that a yes?"

"Give me a few hours."

Steve glanced at his watch. "Meet me at the beach house at seven thirty. I'll order some Chinese food and you, me, Amanda, and Jesse can compare notes."

"Where are you off to?"

"My father is getting out of the hospital soon," Steve said. "And he's going to need a nurse to take care of him."

* * *

The logo for Appleby Nursing Services was an apple shaped like a heart. Steve wasn't a graphic arts designer or an expert in advertising, but he thought it was a mistake that the apple had a bite taken out of it.

The apple theme was carried over into their Santa Monica offices, where a big bowl of Washington Red Delicious apples was the centerpiece of the table in the waiting room. The place was decorated with paintings of apples, photos of apples, ceramic apples, crystal apples, apple-shaped pillows, and empty vintage bottles of apple cider.

An apple-shaped man with red cheeks came out to greet Steve. He had a handlebar mustache, a gray pin-striped suit, and a black bow tie.

"Mr. Sloan, I'm Sheldon Mitford, manager of personnel services. How may I help you today?"

"I'm interested in hiring a nurse to care for my father," Steve said. "He'll be released from the hospital soon, and a friend recommended you to me."

Mitford beamed. "We pride ourselves on client satisfaction. The majority of our business is based on referrals. Would you like an apple?"

Steve wondered if he'd ever be able to look at an apple again, much less eat one. "No, thank you."

Mitford led Steve into his corner office, which, to Steve's relief, appeared to be an apple-free zone.

Steve took a seat in a guest chair across the desk from Mitford, who sat in a large leather chair and launched into a lengthy explanation of Appleby's services.

Nurses, certified nursing assistants, and caregivers who are looking for work register with Appleby, which checks their references and interviews them, he told Steve. When clients come looking for help caring for their sick, elderly, or handicapped loved ones, Appleby tries to match them with the best possible nurse or caregiver.

"It's almost like matchmaking," Mitford said. "We do personality profiles of our staff and our patients. We then assign our staff to compatible individuals. For instance, if the patient is a writer, we might pair him with a nurse who is an avid reader."

Appleby provided live-in caregivers as well as people who would visit from time to time to make sure the client was comfortable, taking his medications, and had everything he needed.