"Yep, my apartment's on Chestnut street. Over there near the hospital. Dad owns-uh-owned the building." Robert's eyes refilled.
"I'll call you at four. Then I can pick you up." David gave the son one final expression of sympathy before seeking out Alton Foster.
"Alton, thanks. Is there anything I can do?" David asked.
"Like what?" Foster said, smiling.
"I don't know. Like parking cars or putting rock salt on the ice out there." David didn't wait to see Foster's expression. He spotted Kathy and signaled he was leaving, then thought better of not conversing with her. Sidling over, he said, "I've had enough of this charade. I'll call you."
"Learn anything?" Kathy said.
"I'll call you. And, oh, I have a question."
"What's that?"
He lowered his voice. "In this huge collection of humanity, guess who loves you?"
He zigzagged through the gathering, bounded up the step to the foyer, asked the guy with the ascot for his scarf and gloves, and then felt like he was doing a Bernie Bugles when he returned to Foster.
"Incidentally, Alton," he said, looking around, "wasn't Victor Spritz here?"
"Yes, but he didn't stay long," Foster replied.
Once alone on the front stoop, just this side of a chilling rain, David filled four pages of his notepad with notations and sketches.
The next morning, the tower clock registered eight-fifty. David got out of his car and hurried to the cafeteria to pick up coffee and a doughnut.
At the cash register, he heard the page operator scream, "Dr. Brooks, stat! Dr. Brooks, stat!" David had heard plenty of pages before, but they never quivered with such emotion.
"Paging me?" he said aloud.
He bolted to the nearest wall phone. "Dr. Brooks, here."
"They want you at the parking gate."
"Who's 'they'?"
"Security police. Said it's something serious. They saw you drive in earlier."
"Thanks, Helen." He was about to hang up the receiver. "Wait," he said, "which gate?"
"Doctors' parking lot."
David heaved his breakfast into a trash container, and, Friday in hand, burst through the cloakroom and out into a gloomy drizzle. Shallow mounds of snow rimmed the lot. Ahead, stem faces huddled around a late model white Cadillac parked directly opposite the card machine at the toll gate. Its arm was in the up position.
A security guard met him halfway. "We opened the door to see if we could help the guy, Doc, but it was no use. We probably got our prints all over. Looks like a single bullet through the temple. The police are on their way."
At the driver's side of the car, several resident physicians and nurses separated for David. He noted the window in the opened door was down. He saw a man slumped over the passenger seat, his face twisted back and to the left. David leveraged himself on the headrest and leaned forward to get a better look. It was Dr. Everett Coughlin.
Chapter 9
David straightened when he heard sirens getting closer. He reached over and palpated unsuccessfully for a carotid pulse, careful to avoid the sliver of crimson that crusted Coughlin's jaw above. Turning, his left foot slipped to the side and, after catching himself, he bent to verify that the corner of a shiny object wedged between the front wheel and a clump of snow was worth identifying. It was a laminated plastic entry card bearing Couglin's name and the designation, "Courtesy Staff."
Face hardened and flushed, David clasped his hands behind his back and walked to the passenger side. He peered through the wet front window as he put on his gloves, and he carefully opened the door. The body's head and neck were now more clearly visible. There was a small round wound above the left ear but no tattooing, soot smudge or burn. A slender ribbon of blood was caked down the ear. He didn't disturb the head to examine it for an exit wound.
Three police cruisers, flashing lights cutting through the raw grey morning, funneled to a screeching stop along with a small van and several nondescript cars. Kathy, Nick, Sparky, a technician, the medical examiner, two deputies and a handful of uniformed police officers piled out. One officer ran back to the parking lot entrance to cordon it off with yellow tape. Others ran tape from both corners of the nearby hospital wing to trees deep in the woods on the opposite side. Another sealed off the entrance from the hospital itself. David rubbed his nose, wondering how doctors would retrieve their cars to leave. Worry about that later. He also wondered if the crime scene unit kept its vehicles idling, waiting for such calls to come in.
"It didn't take you long," he said to Kathy.
"Luckily, we were having a special Saturday morning briefing. Dropped everything. What do we have?" She raised the collar of her blue trench coat against the drizzle, now turning coarse.
"Coughlin."
"Coughlin? Dead?"
"Very."
"They said `shooting.'
"I just got here myself, but looks like he took it in the temple."
Kathy raised her voice as she looked around. "Anyone hear a shot?" No one answered.
"Probably used a suppressor, anyway," she said.
As Kathy joined Nick who was leaning over the body from the passenger side, David drifted off into the elevated wooded area opposite the gate, surmising the killer had sniped from a dense cover there rather than from the bluish shell of a budding psychiatric building on a higher landing fifty yards away. For six months, crews had worked the equipment in forty-hour weeks but the diesels and jackhammers were silent on weekends.
He examined for footprints and, damning the rain for melting the snow among the bushes, felt his knee buckle as he threaded his way up the ice-crusted slope. On a small ridge behind an oak, he spotted a rubber object sprouting through some wet leaves and used a handkerchief to pick it up; it was a rubber nipple from a baby bottle. Two feet away, he found a single cartridge casing resting against a heap of cartons, planks and mortar discarded from the construction site. He placed them into separate envelopes which he took from his breast pocket.
David returned to the oak tree and inspected the bushes on either side of it. He stood there for a moment, proud of collecting evidence but frustrated by the turn of events. Another murder to foul things up. Coughlin didn't do the first job? Is this a diversion killing or the second in a payback plan? Spritz? Or some enemy we haven't met, yet. Two murderers? Coughlin threatened Tanarkle pretty good. And, what about the police. This botches that up: there goes my leeway.
He walked left to a gentler slope and returned to the car. He tried to disguise the look of anguish he felt in his face. "I had a premonition," he said to Nick.
"That Coughlin would be killed?"
"No, that he'd be the one who would kill again." Nick flashed a superior grin. "Well," he said, "at least you got the character right."
The statement didn't resonate well with David and he sensed Kathy noticed. She motioned him aside. "You all right?" she said. "You seem wounded. Forget it, that's just his brand of humor."
"Ha-ha, laugh a minute," David said. "But, that's not it. That over there-I guess it's kinda…you know…jolted my confidence." He curled his lip in disgust as he nodded toward Coughlin's body.
"Well, it shouldn't. It should just double everyone's responsibility, that's all."
She moved closer to him and whispered, "David, you've done all the right things. It's not your fault the guy killed again-plus … "
"Yeah, I know," he replied, stepping on her words. He thought he'd finally licked his habit of cutting people off in conversation. "Look, you all carry on. I'm going to walk it off for awhile. I'll be back."
He started to turn but then reached into his pocket and handed Kathy the envelopes. "Here's your suppressor," he said. "It's pretty crude. Plus a spent casing." He pointed toward the bank of woods. "I found them up there by the big tree."