"Comin' up behind her, you mean? Possible, but by no means conclusive. Just as likely she bit her lip."
Hardy sat a moment. He stared without focus in the direction of the venetian blinds behind Strout's desk. Dust motes hung in the striped shafts of sunlight. The cylinder spun a few more times. Eventually, he looked up. "So why'd suicide even get mentioned?"
"She had GSR"-gunshot residue-"on her right hand. And I know, I know what you're going to say." Strout held up his hand. "Doesn't prove she fired the gun. The shot that killed her could have put her in the gunshot environment. And you're a hundred percent right. But there's the gun by her hand…" Strout wound down, met Hardy's eyes. "I didn't have any forensic reason to rule it out, Diz."
"So somebody might have done a decent job of making it look like a suicide?"
"That's within the realm of the possible, Diz. It surely is. But let me ask you a question. Why do you want her to be murdered?"
"I guess because it's the only place left."
"Except your list, you mean."
Hardy shook his head. "As Mr. Freeman points out, there's no definite correlation between anybody on that list and who killed Tim Markham. But if Carla was killed, I'm betting it had to be the same person who killed her husband."
"But wasn't your client the last one at her house before…?" Strout let that hang.
Hardy sighed. "The theory's not perfect yet, John. I'm working on it.
Armed with their search warrant, Bracco and Fisk approached Donna, the records clerk at Portola. She was about thirty years old, slightly overweight, edgy at first when she found out they were policemen. She wore a small ring in her purple lips and another through her right eyebrow. It was obvious to Fisk that Bracco wasn't going to be comfortable talking to her, so he took point. Somehow, within minutes, they were all friends. She was competent at her job and pulled up and printed out all the Portola personnel and patient records for the relevant days within about a half hour.
After another half hour in one of the conference rooms, they pretty much had what they thought Glitsky wanted. As it turned out, the ICU nurses did rotate on a fairly regular schedule, although throughout the hospital there were more of them than the two inspectors had first been led to believe. In all, on the ten shifts when Kensing's list implied that patients might have died prematurely, nine nurses had spent some time in the intensive care unit. Only two, however, had been on duty for every death shift-Patricia Daly and Rajan Bhutan.
"Except we don't know for sure yet that any of those ten were homicides, do we?" Bracco asked. "All we know is Loring and Markham."
"But we do know Daly wasn't around for Markham, don't we?" Fisk replied. "Although Bhutan was. His partner that shift was-what's her name?"
She was one of the other seven regular ICU nurses, and Bracco had it at his fingertips. "Connie Rowe."
"I don't know how you remember a detail like that. I recognize the name when I hear it but I can't pull it up for the life of me."
"That's all right, Harlen. That's why they put us together. There's stuff you're good at that I'd never think about. Like Donna, for example, just now. Or looking for Loring's shift, which I had completely blown off."
Fisk, warmed by the praise, stood up and stretched. "What's another half hour when we're having this much fun?"
They both walked out to records-by now they were old friends with Donna-and told her there was a last shift they had to check. Bracco the detail man remembered the date: November 12. Marjorie Loring had breathed her last during the swing shift, between 4:00 P.M. and midnight.
Donna's fingers flew over the keyboard; then she looked up at them. "That's weird," she said. "I think every shift you've looked at, there's been this name R. Bhutan, and it's here, too. Are you guys looking specifically for somebody?"
"No, but he just keeps turning up, doesn't he?"
The young woman clicked her black fingernails on the countertop. "What is it about these dates, anyway? Can you tell me?"
Fisk leaned over and theatrically looked both ways, up and down the length of the room. "We could," he said and added the old chestnut, "but then we'd have to kill you."
Donna's eyes grew into saucers for a second; then she giggled and punched the key to print a hard copy of the record. Fisk took the sheet and glanced at it. Connie Rowe again, he noticed, not Patricia Daly. With a meaningful glance, he showed it to his partner, then turned back to the clerk. "Let me ask you something, Donna, if I may. Is there any record of the doctors who came and went during these same shifts that we've been looking at?"
She thought for a moment. "Well, the individual patients would have had their own doctors making rounds. Is that what you mean?"
"Not exactly. I mean all the doctors who had reason to go into the ICU on those days, for whatever reason."
"All of them?"
Fisk shrugged and smiled at her. "I don't know. I'm just asking."
Her tongue worked at the ring in her lip. "They might keep a record at the nurses' station-you could ask, although I don't know why they would. The doctors come and go all the time, you know. I think it would kind of depend on a lot of things."
To Jack Langtry, the crime scene supervisor, the situation was bizarre.
Just before lunch, Marlene Ash invited him down to her office to discuss Carla Markham. When he arrived, another guy was standing by her, leaning over her desk, examining the scene photos. Langtry could smell lawyers a mile away, and this guy was one. And then Ash said by way of explanation, "Mr. Hardy's representing Dr. Kensing. Lieutenant Glitsky and Mr. Jackman have agreed to cooperate with him in exchange for his client's testimony. He'd like to ask you a few questions."
Langtry didn't know what to make of this, but if Marlene Ash was okay with it, then so was he. "Sure, mate," he said. "No worries."
Hardy's eyes were pinned to the color print of Mrs. Markham's body as it lay when Langtry had first seen her on the kitchen floor. The gun was in the top of the picture. Hardy had his finger on it. "Where'd the gun come from?"
"Lower-left drawer in Markham's desk, which was in the office next to the kitchen. At least that's where the registration was, the ammunition and cleaning stuff. We got a picture of it somewhere in that stack."
"I think I've seen it. Twenty-two, right?"
Langtry lifted his own eyes from the picture, looked in Hardy's face, said nothing.
"You got it in evidence, right? How many rounds did it hold?"
"Six, but there were only five spent casings."
Hardy frowned. "So five shots fired?"
Langtry shrugged-how the hell did he know? "Four dead people, one dog, one round each."
"What are you getting at, Diz?"
Hardy turned to Marlene. "I'm thinking somebody else fired the gun the first five times, then put it in her hand and fired again and took the last casing with him-"
"Where'd the slug go?" Langtry asked.
"I don't know. Out the window?"
"Closed."
"Maybe it was open the night before. How about the kids?" Hardy asked. He flipped a few photos to where they began; then he looked up and away for a moment and sucked in a breath. Langtry felt the same way, sickened again at the sight of them.
"What do you want to know?"
"Just what went down."
While Langtry spent the next few minutes outlining the specifics of the crime, Hardy flipped through the pile of photographs. When Langtry was done, he had another line of questioning. "How loud's a twenty-two revolver?"