“Dotty?” Casey asked, locking her eyes on LePointe. “Jesus! I’m sorry, Unko.”
“Sorry? Why?” he asked, swallowing. It must have been difficult, since he had to have a dry mouth.
“You two were such close friends,” Casey said. “You’ve known her for thirty years, that’s why. You worked together at River Run.”
“Nurse Fugate was employed at the hospital and I was the director of psychiatry. We were hardly friends. She was an acquaintance, although I suppose we developed a superficial relationship over the years. She was a talented and dedicated professional. Naturally I’m very sorry to hear that she’s dead. I haven’t spoken to her since she retired last year. We didn’t see each other socially.”
“Even so, you must be curious to learn how she died,” Alexa remarked.
“I assume it was a heart attack, stroke, or something,” LePointe said. “She was not a young lady.”
“She was murdered,” Alexa said.
LePointe shrugged. “That’s terrible. Did she live in a bad neighborhood?”
“I’m sorry?” Alexa asked.
“Well, she was a nurse. Perhaps drug addicts knew that. She resisted them and they killed her.”
“It appears a mental patient who was living with her most likely committed the crime. So, you’ve never been to her home?”
“Why on earth would I go to her home?”
Alexa would have loved to show him the Polaroid of him standing naked in Fugate’s bedroom preening before her mirror.
“What patient?” It was Casey who asked, and not her uncle.
“I don’t think we need to dwell on such unpleasantness at this particular juncture,” LePointe said stiffly.
“If you haven’t spoken to her, I guess you didn’t know that she was such a dedicated professional that she kept a mental patient locked away in her home?” Alexa asked him. “A mental patient who was supposed to be in ward fourteen at River Run.”
“Nurse Fugate was a career psychiatric nurse and a compassionate human being,” LePointe said. “And she’s retired and capable of helping a patient.”
“A patient who vanished from ward fourteen about the time Nurse Fugate retired.”
“What are you talking about?” Casey asked, bewildered.
“The patient was Sibhon Danielson,” Alexa said. “And Fugate kept her in a padlocked bedroom with bars on the windows and a bolt on the outside of the door.”
There was an audible gasp from Casey, and despite the fact that he’d been doing a good job holding his feelings back till that point, LePointe’s eyes flashed surprise for the briefest instant.
“Her?” Casey whispered, her eyes fevered. Openmouthed, she sat down in an armchair. “Dear God…”
“Oddly, it appears there’s no record at River Run that she isn’t still locked up.”
“You’re sure?” Casey asked. “Oh my God! Lucille Burch was right.”
“Beyond any shadow of a doubt, Burch doesn’t know it for certain, but someone must have told her about it. You didn’t know that Sibby was living with Nurse Fugate, Dr. LePointe?”
“Of course not!” LePointe snapped. “How would I know that?”
“No reason, besides the fact that you’ve been writing Nurse Fugate prescriptions for anti-psychotic medications used for treating schizophrenia. Along with some heavy sedatives. You didn’t prescribe them for Nurse Fugate’s personal medical conditions, did you?”
“I assume, if what you say is accurate, the prescriptions were forged,” LePointe said. “I never prescribed anything for Dotty. I’d like to see them.”
“Nurse Fugate, you mean,” Alexa said. She wondered if he knew the pill bottles were gone. But what would that mean? Either Sibby had told him she’d taken them from the house, which seemed very unlikely, or someone else had told him. But who?
“What?” he asked.
“You said you always called her Nurse Fugate, but just now you called her Dotty,” Alexa said.
“Sibhon Danielson was at River Run and you never told me?” Casey asked her uncle.
LePointe stood, and Alexa could tell he wanted to throw things at her-chase her out of the house swinging the poker that leaned against the fireplace. But he came around the desk and stood beside Casey’s chair. “Agent Keen, you’ve upset my niece with your insinuations. Please leave us and get on about your business. My niece is not emotionally able to withstand this sort of pressure. I am warning you: you are stepping on very dangerous ground.”
Casey was sobbing. When her uncle put his hand on her shoulder, she shot from the chair and fixed him with an icy look of rage. “What is going on here? My God, Unko! What the hell is going on here?”
“I have no idea,” LePointe said. “I don’t know anything about Sibhon Danielson. I’m as stunned as you are, my dear, but I’ve yet to see any proof that she is indeed out of the hospital, or was living with Nurse Fugate.” The smile Dr. LePointe intended to be reassuring would have looked at home on a Bell’s palsy victim. “Let’s not jump to conclusions and say things we’ll regret.”
“That monster murdered my parents!” Casey yelled. She turned her eyes to Alexa. “Where is she now?”
“We have no idea.”
Alexa decided she had nothing to lose in pushing, to see what happened. “You don’t know anything about Sibby Danielson, Doctor? Odd. If Sibby Danielson was an inmate at River Run for the twenty-six years where you were director of the facility, and were seeing patients on her ward, you must have known she was there.”
“Of course I knew she was there,” LePointe replied angrily. “So what? I never treated her. I wouldn’t know the woman if she walked into this room.”
“According to the police files, I understood that she was your patient when she killed your brother and his wife,” Alexa said.
Again Casey’s eyes widened with obvious disbelief. “Unko? Is that true?”
“She was no longer my patient when she did that!” LePointe roared. “She was upset because I had quit treating her. She was a psychotic mess and she was disturbed, and possibly she imagined that my brother was behind my refusal to treat her. Patient transference. She imagined we were married and Curry was standing between her and some ideal of happiness. She confronted my wife and created a scene at the country club. I tried to get her committed before! Casey, I did not know she was out of the hospital! Sibhon Danielson is an extremely dangerous woman. I don’t know, but if she killed Dorothy, it was because poor Dorothy had taken it upon herself to help her, which the hospital was never able to do. Maybe Dorothy aided in her escape in some misguided sense of compassion or sense of duty. It’s even possible they may have had some codependent relationship that Dorothy didn’t want to have ended.”
“I’m sure they’re pulling her records at the hospital about now to get a photograph and a physical description. Since we are here together, perhaps you could give me a current description, Dr. LePointe?”
“What? How would I know? I just told you I haven’t so much as laid eyes on her in years. I never treated her at River Run, if that’s where you’re taking this, Agent Keen. I doubt you’ll find anybody who will say differently.”
“I don’t disbelieve that,” Alexa said truthfully. “But things can change.”
“Maybe I should call Lucille Burch and tell her that Gary’s been abducted,” Casey said.
“No! The media will just make it into a sideshow!” LePointe snarled.
“They’ll jump all over it,” Alexa agreed. “The possibility of a Sibby Danielson connection to Gary’s disappearance will be one hell of a trigger, especially since they were already looking into Sibby’s whereabouts. They’d had a tip that she’d been released from River Run,” she said for LePointe’s benefit. “I assumed it was because it’s an anniversary of the murders. I think we should use them to get word out on Gary.”
“About time,” Casey said.
LePointe’s worried eyes shifted back and forth between Alexa and his niece. Alexa was sure he was seeing the horror of film crews camped outside his high gate, the unpleasant questions, scores of investigative reporters rooting around in his business like a pack of wild pigs.